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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
What do cinematic “universes,” cloud archiving, and voice cloning have in common? They’re in the business of foreverizing – the process of revitalizing things that have degraded, failed, or disappeared so that they can remain active in the present. To foreverize something is to reanimate it, to enclose and protect it from time and the elements, and to eradicate the feeling of nostalgia that accompanies loss. Foreverizing is a bulwark against instability, but it isn’t an infallible enterprise. That which is promised to last forever often does not, and that which is disposed of can sometimes last, disturbingly, forever.
In this groundbreaking book, American philosopher Grafton Tanner develops his theory of foreverism: an anti-nostalgic discourse that promises growth without change and life without loss. Engaging with pressing issues from the ecological impact of data storage to the rise of reboot culture, Tanner tracks the implications of a society averse to nostalgia and reveals the new weapons we have for eliminating it.
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Seitenzahl: 122
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
1. When Nothing Ever Ends
Nostalgia After the Death of Progress
Foreverism
Notes
2. Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost
Preservation, Restoration, Foreverizing
Forever Is a Place on Earth
Notes
3. Trapped In the Present
Not If, But When
If Spring Will Ever Come
Faye Valentine’s Tape
Notes
4. Now and Forever
Putting Nostalgia to Work
Missing the Past
The Future of Foreverism
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Theory ReduxSeries editor: Laurent de Sutter
Published Titles
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Diedrich Diederichsen, Aesthetics of Pop Music
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Boris Groys, Becoming an Artwork
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Foreverism
Grafton Tanner
polity
Copyright © Grafton Tanner 2023
The right of Grafton Tanner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5807-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2023931487
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
For Anna
Acknowledgments
First thanks goes to Laurent de Sutter, who sent a bottle into the sea asking if I’d be interested in writing a short theoretical intervention into the contemporary. He was kind enough to indulge my ideas and allow me the freedom to explore. My gratitude extends to John Thompson, Lindsey Wimpenny, and the entire team at Polity for shepherding this book to publication, and to Oriol Rosell for kickstarting it all.
Early drafts of these ideas were presented at Queens College in 2021 and for the Nostalgia Movements Conference in Zagreb in 2022. Thank you to Josh Chapdelaine and Dario Vuger for inviting me to speak.
My family has supported me from the beginning, and I’m forever thankful for them. Anna is my advocate, my peace. My love for her will last forever, of that I’m sure.
1When Nothing Ever Ends
Section 17 of Hans Gross’s 1911 book Criminal Psychology concerns “the question of home-sickness,” which, he points out, “is of essential significance and must not be undervalued” when studying the criminal mind. He maintains that if nostalgia cannot be relieved, it can fester in a person and make them murderous:
So then, if the home-sick person is able, he tries to destroy his nostalgia through the noisiest and most exciting pleasures; if he is not, he sets fire to a house or in case of need, kills somebody—in short what he needs is explosive relief. Such events are so numerous that they ought to have considerable attention.1
The early twentieth century produced a plethora of opinions on the nostalgia reaction, and Hans Gross was not the only positivist to link the emotion with criminality. Karl Jaspers contributed his own assumptions in his 1909 dissertation, writing about a young maidservant in 1795 who moved away from home to pursue work but eventually burned down her place of employment because she was homesick.2 In a 1922 study, psychiatrist Maximilian Bresowsky told the story of a maid who murdered her four-year-old charge because killing the child was the only way she could leave work and return home.3 Ernst Kretschmer, the German psychiatrist who developed a classification system matching body types with personality traits, also made the connection in 1934:
The nostalgia-reaction in the form of arson and child-murder is a typical syndrome in maidservants between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. The girls who exhibit it are usually infantile and weakly, with retarded pubescence…. In this lamb-like, timid, and autistic way, such girls often exhibit schizoid features.4
Psychologist Edmund Smith Conklin will claim as late as 1935 that “the homesick reaction” can result in “explosive, or uncontrollable, criminal actions, arson, and even murder.” But he will surmise that nostalgia is declining thanks to “the greater amount of travel and shifting of places of residence occurring in modern civilization.” To prevent nostalgia from occurring, he will caution parents against excessive “petting and coddling which develops parental fixations.”5
By the early twentieth century, nostalgia’s threat was its power to turn an ordinary, agentic individual into a criminal. To the positivists, however, this came as no surprise. In his literature review of nostalgia, Willis H. McCann cites psychologist Karl Marbe, who “did not think it strange that homesickness sometimes would cause crime. He explained that those who can relieve themselves of homesickness by committing a crime will do so unless restrained.”6
Earlier writings discussed the possibility that individuals from rural areas might be particularly vulnerable to nostalgia. On February 10, 1864, Assistant Surgeon of the US Army J. Theodore Calhoun presented a paper entitled “Nostalgia as a Disease of Field Service.” He argued that troops were dangerously at risk of contracting the disease and that it sometimes caused other diseases to spread, leading him to label nostalgia “a complication to be dreaded as one of the most serious that could befall the patient.” Calhoun said that soldiers from rural backgrounds were more susceptible to nostalgia because “a country boy is more at home.” The soldier from the city, on the other hand, is stronger and more mature; he “cares not where he is, or where he eats, while his country cousin, pines for the old homestead and his father’s groaning board.” But it was on the battlefield, Calhoun declared, where rural men could really prove their manhood and thus cure their nostalgia:
Any influence that will tend to render the patient more manly, will exercise a curative power. In boarding schools, as perhaps many of us will remember, ridicule is wholly relied upon, and will often be found effective in camp. Unless the disease affects a number of the same organization … the patient can often be laughed out of it by his comrades, or reasoned out of it by appeals to his manhood; but of all potent agents, an active campaign, with its attendant marches, and more particularly its battles, is the best curative.7
The talk was popular. The Medical and Surgical Reporter published it two weeks later, and excerpts appeared in Scientific American that April, under the title “Home-sickness as a Malady.” The Medical Society hosted a discussion on nostalgia with other army physicians. Some noted that a lack of cleanliness was the first symptom of nostalgia. Others doubled down on the supposition that soldiers from too “domestic” a background, who haven’t “‘roughed it’ before,” were prone to contracting the disease.8
Following Calhoun’s logic, psychologist L. W. Kline believed that educated travelers were too intellectual to be bothered by nostalgic emotions. The mature, civilized subject could embark on adventure without feeling an unhealthy attachment to home. They embraced the future, while the “lover of home” was stuck in the past. Kline ended his 1898 paper on nostalgia with these words:
The migrant is cosmopolitan, has manifold interests, and finds profitable objects and kindred spirits in a variety of situations. He may be found in the commercial, speculative, daring, progressive, macroscopic interests of the world. The lover of home is provincial, plodding and timid. He is the world’s hod-carrier. His interests are identified with the conservative and microscopic affairs of society.9
The positivist discourses on nostalgia might seem extreme to us now. But because nostalgia has an uncanny ability to wrench people out of the present, it posed a threat to the civilizing process promoted by juridico-medical positivists. They thought that escaping from the present through nostalgic reflection or homesick yearning might cause a person to be backward and unable to work. Many of their writings were inflected with racist, sexist, and nationalistic sentiments. In praise of the almighty present, the medicalization of nostalgia allowed for deeply rooted prejudices to be reaffirmed.
Antinostalgic positivists were the authors of a new genre of writing linking the figure of abnormality with nostalgia, thus producing the idea of the nostalgic subject. A nostalgic subject became, in the words of Foucault, an “individual to be corrected”: the one who is “regular in his irregularity” and “appears to require correction because all the usual techniques, procedures, and attempts at training … have failed to correct him.” Nonconforming individuals, those who failed to adopt the identity of the progressive man of the Enlightenment, were routinely accused of backwardness. The early twentieth century witnessed this emergence of the modern nostalgic subject, the longing, yearning individual in need of “supercorrection.”10
Over the course of the twentieth century a massive shift will occur. The opinions on nostalgia will be rearranged. Less than a hundred years after Bresowsky, Kretschmer, and Conklin linked nostalgia with criminality, Fabrik Brands, an ad agency out of London, compiled a list of tips for companies to conduct successful nostalgia marketing campaigns:
1. Know your inspiration. If you want to use retro ideas effectively in your new campaign, then you need to ask yourself … How can you make nostalgia work well for your current campaign, and what features will you need to think about to ensure that you get the attention of your audience?2. Keep your audience and personality in mind. Before you can engage in a powerful nostalgia marketing strategy, you need to make sure that you’re drawing images and ideas from the right generation, to appease the right demographic.3. Pair nostalgia with social media. If nostalgia is the bait for your marketing campaign, then social media is the fishing rod … People don’t just want to enjoy the memories of a nostalgic image or sound, they want to be able to link their friends and family members to the experience and say “Hey, remember this?”4. Tap into brand history (if you can). If your company has already been around for some time, then a great way to increase the impact of your nostalgia marketing strategy, is to tap into some powerful brand history.5. Pay close attention to detail. Finally, when it comes to nostalgia marketing … it’s generally a good idea to combine retro concepts with new ideas to make the experience more engaging and exciting for your customers.11
What happened to nostalgia? How did it go from a condition of abnormality, even criminality, in the early twentieth century to a marketing tactic today? We obviously don’t think nostalgia can cause a person to commit murder anymore, or advertising firms wouldn’t encourage companies to use nostalgia in their marketing. The truth is, there actually isn’t much of a difference between the words of the positivists and Fabrik Brands. In fact, they’re both trying to accomplish the same thing: the eradication of longing.
Nostalgia After the Death of Progress
At first glance, it appears the history of nostalgia is a palatable progress narrative: over time physicians learned it wouldn’t cause anyone to commit crime, and so now it has become a commodity flashing across screens, something anyone can feel and consume. For a long time, we comforted ourselves with this fable because it served as a metric by which we measured scientific advancement and medical enlightenment, evidence of our victory over other “outdated” conditions (vapors, hysteria) that, in hindsight, were human emotions pathologized and subjected to a disciplinary regime. At times it fooled us with the assumption that conditions in the past were more intense, deadlier, and that the achievements of science have tamed their wild tempests, placing them under control. We were certain that as the large mammals roaming the past have gone extinct, so too have the raging passions that were once so ungovernable they could kill. Either myth — that we advanced enough to learn nostalgia isn’t a disease, or that progress refined its once unruly destruction — soothed any concern that traces of backwardness survived the march of progress.
