Ah, what the hell

I feel like I’m coming so late to the conversation, clambering my way up the list of emails then posts, stopping to catch a vista and formulate a witty aside response that is immediately lost in the effort of further climbing.

So, fuck it, I’ll just dive in with some thoughts.

I don’t think nostalgia is a static phenomena, but one that has always existed and has radically evolved.

And I think it is always a tool of hierarchy. It provides the structural anchor for manipulations of narrative, can always postulate the past as in some way “ideal” and harness the association to support the hierarchical structure.

The power in the equation is the postulation, is the manipulation of the narrative of the past. It would have been a more clumsy weapon to wield when nostalgia couldn’t be defined by a decade, when it was the amorphous “before” time, where the stories of oral cultures lived. Those stories evolve glacially. And yet they still operate as the moral foundation for control.

As media (here including the oral tradition and maybe best understood, just for my purpose at the moment, as that with which we share stories) evolved, the stories were written, coded, and easier to hack than a storyteller’s brain.

The process speeds up with each advance in media technology. The printing press spread a (relatively) singular account of the Biblical times, to which the less-powered could be pointed. The birth of the novel allowed periods of time to be more clearly defined, provided even finer targets for the backward search for wish-fulfillment. At some point, a nearly wholly-fictitious American West was created, perhaps the first narrative of nostalgic control cut of whole cloth.

But, it has reached some critical mass in the last forty years. While the counter-culture was brewing up in the 60’s, mainstream media narratives were still dominated by social models from the 50’s. The 70’s? Three words. Happy-fucking-Days. The Glory Days were holding on for dear life.

The 80’s aren’t a bad place for the start of the fracturing. I wonder if anything of huge cultural significance happened early on in that decade? Wait, wait, that channel that used to play music videos. I’d even go so far as to argue that the shift was so huge it took the beings of hierarchy to figure out how to hack it. Maybe eight years or so. And seeds of regional narrative development took hold.

By the end of the 80s and into the early 90s, pop culture stopped being quite so monolithic. To say “the 90’s” carries less clear significance than any of the previous back to the 20s.

Anyway, here we are now, 17 years into an array of narrative-creating devices, all of the most potent in the hands of the hierarchy, who use those devices to brand decades, to create nostalgic feelings in those they want to look back so as to prevent them looking forward. Kids appropriate because they’ve been chasing the cool for so long, and the marketers so deft at manipulating the leading edge of it, cultural appropriation is easier than the chase, they stop trying to define because they’ve seen meaning constantly mutated, never without a mediating anchor.

That’s why it pisses us off and we call it inauthentic. We believe our personal feeling of nostalgia is unmediated. Maybe it is. Pot, the short-circuiter of short-term memory, which grounds you in the moment while making universal archetypes of everything, is an anti-heirarchical drug, maligned by every power structure ever, perhaps because it hacks the mediation.

Wait, where was I?

Sorry, I haven’t gotten to do this kind of thing in a long time. So forgive the rambling and, perhaps, utter lack of a central point or coherent idea. I'm not going to back to read all this nonsense to find out.

JJ