Nostalgia Film as Ideology

"...Nostalgia art gives us the image of various generations of the past as fashion-plate images that entertain no determinable ideological relationship to other moments of time: they are not the outcome of anything, nor are they the antecedents of our present; they are simply images. This is the sense in which I describe them as substitutes for any genuine historical consciousness rather than specific new forms of the latter." - Fredric Jameson, Interview (1986) in Flash Art.

"Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation. The inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse, George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), set out to recapture as so many films have attempted since, the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era; and one tends to feel, that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire- not merely the stability and prosperity of pax Americana but also the first naive innocence of the counter-cultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs. With this initial breakthrough, other generational periods open up for aesthetic colonization (e.g. Polanski's Chinatown, Bertolucci's Il Conformista)... [Nostalgia film] approaches the "past" through stylistic connotation, conveying "pastness" by the glossy qualities of the image, and "1930s-ness" or "1950s-ness" by the attributes of fashion, as for example, some Disney-EPCOT "concept" of China."

"Every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today." -Jameson (1984), "Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", in New Left Review

----
I must confess that I had an early (ages 8-12) fascination with nostalgia films about the 1950s before I had any inkling that they were, in the sense described above, nostalgia films. The Sandlot (1993) was a film that my family owned growing up, which I watched more times than I can count. Grease (1978) and Stand By Me (1986) were staples as well. Or, take Back to the Future (1985): think of the contrast between downtown Hill Valley in the 1980s (run down, with homeless people lying about) versus the 1950s. My thinking at the time was that the 1950s and early 60s was an era of "cleanliness", tight-knit communities, small neighborhood shops, block parties, stability, innocence and all the rest of it. I recall often wishing that I'd grown up "then".

It is striking, then, how much films of this sort shape contemporary consciousness of what we take to be the past. I'm not sure, but I wager that schools didn't have "decade day" before the 1980s. Would it have been possible, or even made sense, in the 1920s to hold a "decade dress-up day"? Could there have been intelligible, ostensibly distinct, stereotypes corresponding to "1910s-ness" or "1890s-ness"? My guess is that the answer is no. So what is it about the present state of affairs that makes possible the reification of decades into "glossy images" that track shifts in fashion? It seems to me that any answer we give must take seriously the third Jameson quote above.

There is, to be sure, a serious question here about how to critically understand the post-war era (e.g. as arising out of the reconfiguration of global capitalism and power relations after WWII, the emergence of a "consumer society", changes in the forces of production, a decline in class struggle, ruthless repression of the Left, violently enforced conformity, elimination of the memory of the 1930s, etc.). But critically understanding nostalgia film requires that we ask a different question: what was it about the ideological/political pressures of the early 1970s (and, to some extent, the decade and a half that followed) that cultivated this need to retrieve a "lost past"? Moreover, in what ways can we understand the objects of desire in nostalgia film as a projection of such pressures and needs?

Succinctly put, the question cannot simply be: were the 1950s/early60s really like that? Neither should it be: should we want to return to it? Our question must be: what is it about contemporary societies such that this nostalgic image, whatever its historical veracity, is the American "privileged lost object of desire"?

There are a couple of obvious things to say. The global economic landslide of the early 1970s marked the decisive end of the "long boom" of the postwar era. It marked a rupture, a tectonic shift in the conditions that grounded the social formations and cultural configurations of the 1950s and early 60s. If the active, conscious revolt of the late 1960s was a determinate negation, the early 1970s represented a structural, subterranean shift in the basic center of gravity. Suddenly the arrangements upon which postwar prosperity had been built no longer created the conditions for continued profit accumulation. Stagflation set in, and unemployment skyrocketed. The 1973 oil crisis struck at the heart of the manufactured obsession with ostentatious automobiles.

Unsurprisingly, this shift in the global conjuncture meant that the old ideological repertoire of postwar American capitalism went into crisis. The old ideological stabilizers were being undermined by new events; the old legitimating devices weren't able to do their work when faced with the landslide of the early 1970s.

But as Marxists are aware, ideological shifts don't immediately, mechanically accompany shifts in the economic structure of society. As Zizek noted after the 9/11 attacks, "On September 11th, the USA was given the opportunity to realize what kind of world it was part of. It might have taken this opportunity -but it did not; instead it opted to reassert its traditional ideological commitments: out with feelings of responsibility and guilt towards the impoverished Third World, we are the victims now!" Something similar accompanied the erosion of the postwar era (although I would want a less univocal and more internally conflicted analysis of "America" than Zizek offers). Rather than question the very ideological coordinates of the postwar era in light of counter-veiling evidence; the temptation was to cling hopelessly to the manufactured objects of desire appropriate to that anachronistic ideology.

But, and this is where the Jameson bit above is particularly interesting, the mode of interaction with this "past" is one in which the "image of various generations of the past as fashion-plate images... entertain no determinable ideological relationship to other moments of time: they are not the outcome of anything, nor are they the antecedents of our present; they are simply images". Here, Marx's analysis of the fetishism of commodities is operative in the background. Rather than encountering the past in all of its material complexity, we see only various objects on a shelf, shorn of history or ties to social relations. This is only more perverse when we note that the objects in questions are ostensibly about the past.

Another interesting question for me here is how race fits into this picture. It's clear that there is something deeply racist about the entire ideology of nostalgia here, insofar as it wears its white-exclusiveness on its sleeve. That is, the ideology simply couldn't be a fantasy for black people- it isn't even aimed at convincing black people to want such a return to this "idyllic past". The result is that the ideology doesn't even see black people as subjects in need of convincing here; they are non-persons who are best blotted out of this fantasy entirely. Seeing them as subjects to whom white American must justify themselves would be to accept the gains of the struggles of the 1960s; but this nostalgic ideology, of course, in part seeks to forget such struggles entirely. So, it's not that the ideology has an active anti-black theme per se, the ideology entirely erases and blots out blackness.

Read More...

Summary only...

On the ahistoricity of contemporary theoretical training

Allow me to apologize, first of all, for the inadequacy, crudeness and potential arrogance of the critique that follows. I'm aware of the shortcomings of such arm-chair analyses, but I nevertheless think this one has at least some import. Here goes.

So, I've noticed something about the way that what's called "theory" is taught and reproduced in the humanities in universities: it seems utterly bereft of historical awareness.

This ahistoricity, if you'll grant me such an awkward locution, manifests itself at many different levels. The first is at the level of the (graduate) student and the theoretical positions she confronts in learning "the canon" (whatever that may be). That is to say, the student of contemporary "theory" confronts a set of theoretical texts that are historically unstuck and apparently timeless. Importantly, I don't have "conservative" texts in mind at all: I'm thinking in particular (though not exclusively) about the way that contemporary French thought is taught, thought about, and presented to students in the United States.

It is now commonplace for students of what is called "theory" or "critical theory" or "continental philosophy" or "critical thought" or whatever to imagine that there is a set of texts, written by "great thinkers", whom one must have read in order to be competent. (I note that I don't place words like "theory" or "continental philosophy" in scarequotes because I oppose them as such; on the contrary, I am interested in many of the things often subsumed under such labels. I place them scarequotes because the words themselves are used in a such a loose way these days that it's difficult to know what they're supposed to mean).

Say that someone is interested in Foucault. For many students in their 20s, he isn't really subversive at all; he is part of a group of timeless figureheads of a contemporary "canon". So, according to this ahistorical posture of reverence, a thinker like Foucault, whose work can hardly be said to be a coherent system, is no longer an ex-Marxist student of Althusser who made many different interventions into a variety of intellectual/political conversations. Instead he's a merely a brick in the wall of this contemporary "canon". Althusser is also an interesting case; few students of "theory" read him any more, but people are familiar with him insofar as he is a "precursor" to, say, Foucault in particular. And if such students are aware of Marx at all, it only through the distorted lens of this reified Althusser. The same could be said of Derrida and the way in which students find themselves drawn to Heidegger qua predecessor to Derrida. Accordingly, the "Heidegger" they encounter is an ossified "Great Man" whose work has no meaningful connection to the history of German thought, or God forbid, real material history (complete with such "vulgar" components as economic changes, social struggle, politics, etc).

Fredric Jameson was right on target when he claimed that he feels "a real sense of exasperation with the terms in which our relationship to theorists (mostly continental) is generally staged." He continued as follows.

What bothers me... is the transformation of various thinkers...into brand names for autonomous political systems. In this...[thought] has been infected by the logic of commodity culture in general: where the organization of consumption around brand names determines a quasi-religious conversion, first to the great modern artists -you convert to Proust, or D.H. Lawrence, or to Faulkner, etc. -all purportedly incompatible, but every so often one switches religions; and then in a later stage to the theorists, so that one now converts to Heidegger, or Ricoeur, or Derrida, or Wayne Booth, or Gadamer, or de Man.

The problem with this phenomenon, as Jameson put it, can most easily be put in Marxist terms:

For Marxism there is no purely autonomous "history of ideas" or "history of philosophy". Conceptual works are also, implicitly, responses to concrete situations and conjunctures, of which the national situation remains, even in our multinational age, a very significant framework. Understanding Althusser, for example, therefore means first and foremost understanding the sense and function of his conceptual moves in the France of the 1960s; but when one does that, then the transferability of those former thoughts, now situational responses, to other national situations such as our own, in the U.S., becomes a problematical undertaking. (see Jameson's 1982 interview in Diacritics for more)

This basically says everything I'd want to say about the matter. Knowing the historical conjuncture in which a theoretical intervention is made, its practical intent, and so forth are crucial.

Read More...

Summary only...

States of Injury by Wendy Brown, Chapter 2 Synopsis: Postmodern Exposures and Feminist Hesitations

See the Chapter 1 synopsis here, and a general overview of the book here.

In this chapter, Brown makes these three basic arguments:

1. Postmodernity is a condition and postmodernism an attempt at describing the current conditions of our time, and it does not necessarily entail any particular political prescriptions with it.
2. Feminists who claim postmodernism (the pointing out of the postmodern conditions we live in) will kill their feminist politics, reveal gaps and hesitations in their own feminism.
3. Feminists do not need Truth (aka Reason, Morality), the Subject, or Identity to be feminists, and postmodernity merely forces us to open new political spaces.
   

I think it suffices to do two things in this summary: a) Summarize what Brown sees as the problems caused by postmodernity, and how feminists can forge a politics amid these problems, and b) Summarize and engage with some of the problems Brown sees feminism as having, some of which are exposed by postmodernism. 
First, Brown wants to redirect our attention from "the academically crumbled foundations of Truth, facticity, or the modernist subject," or from postmodernism, to the greatest impediments to oppositional politics which come from postmodernity:

The first condition she thinks is important is that of "technical reason." Now, she never defines what this means exactly, and google brings up nothing relevant and I must admit I don't have a Marcuse reader standing by, so I had to rely on researching something she says is a similar phenomenon, Weber's "instrumental rationality." (If you actually know something about technical reason, or Habermas' "means-end rationality," please let me know if I'm way off the mark here.) So here's my understanding. Technical reason is a false consciousness in which finding the most efficient way of achieving an ends is favored instinctively and focused on socially, at the expense of any justification or reasoning for the value of the ends itself.

You can see how this would apply to her arguments in the first chapter about identity politics and the failures of the state to empower injured parties (although Brown never spells it out for us this way). The most effective way of disciplining the people and systems that injure might be to go through the state, but nobody stops to ask why discipline for injury should be the end-goal of a politics, and what the consequences of such an ends might be.

The subject-disintegrating powers of technical reason, Brown argues,  are far more powerful than those of postmodernism, but technical reason's hegemony becomes even more noticeable and pervasive when "other legitimating discourses of a culture--political, religious, or scientific--are fractured or discredited, a process that is a defining feature of postmodernity." Technical reason in a context of postmodern power, which flows without the boundaries and rigidities of institutions or discrete spheres of power, makes critical articulations of domination, or oppositional politics, incredibly difficult.

Next, Brown looks at disorientation as a supposed threat to feminism, and she defines the problem of disorientation or "being lost," through Frederic Jameson:

This is bewildering, and I use existential bewilderment in this new postmodern space to make a final diagnosis of the loss of our ability to position ourselves within this space and cognitively map it. This is then projected back on the emergence of a global, multinational culture that is decentered and cannot be visualized, a culture in which one cannot position oneself.

In short, Brown goes on to argue that the postmodern loss of collective identity, has caused the clinging to individual identity, even by people who are generally quite critical of liberalism's individualism. 

Lastly, Brown details the problem of "reactionary foundationalism," or clinging to one representative feature of a modern movement to the extent that it is a fundamentalism. This too is a coping method for a loss of collective identity and disorientation general. Just like the Right clings to "the traditional family," and "the American flag," academics on the Left claim to "feminism" in its modern constructs, as if it is one of the "indispensible threads preserving indisputable good."

There is a hard-hitting section on feminist failures that I think is worth going into in more detail. Brown takes on feminists who say their endeavors are crushed by postmodernism's crumbling of "truth" of "morality" and of "the self." She thinks this is silly, first of all, since feminists themselves have argued that the self is constructed socially, that truth and reason have been used to masculine ends, and aren't really all that objective, and that discourse about morality operates as a power mechanism. Not only that, but she thinks the idea that feminism can't exist outside these modernist idioms is problematic and untrue. She looks at quotes like this one from Nancy Harstock's "Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?":

We need to constitute ourselves as subjects as well as objects of history...We need to be assured that some systematic knwoledge about our world and ourselves is possible...We need a theory of power that recognizes that our practical daily activity contains an understanding of the world.

To which Brown responds: "Harstock does not concern herself with the defensibility or persuasiveness of the narrative out of which these items are torn. She is concerned only with the dubious necessity of rescuing them from the discredited narratives, a rescue waged in order to "preserve" feminism from what she takes to be the disorienting, deblitating, and depoliticizing characteristics of post-modern intellectual maneuvers." Brown calls feminist arguments like that both foundationalist and reactionary. It's like Linda Hirshman's infamous WaPo article about how feminism has become so sidetracked by all these interesectional interests, that feminism (whatever the hell that might be in the absence of intersectional concerns) itself is being lost. If that isn't both foundationalist and reactionary I don't know what is...not to mention another instance of the hegemony of instrumental rationality. 

Here's Brown's best summary of her gripes with feminism in her own words, which sort of proceed out of this critique of Harstock:

I will suggest that feminist wariness about postmodernism may ultimately be coterminous with a wariness about politics, when politics is grasped as a terrain of struggle without fixed or metaphysical referents and a terrain of power's irreducible and pervasive presence in human affairs. Contrary to its insistence that it speaks in the name of the political, much feminist anti-postmodernism betrays a preference for extrapolitical terms and practices: for Truth (unchanging, incontestable) over politics (flux, constest, instability); for certainty and security (safety, immutability, privacy) over freedom (vulnerability, publicity); for discoveries (science) over decisions (judgments); for separable subjects armed with established rights and identities over unwieldy and shifting pluralities adjudicating for themselves and their future on the basis of nothing more than their own habits and arguments.

Among her more specific arguments in this section (there really are too many to summarize, but there are a lot, and I agree with most), Brown is critical of feminists' insistence on treating the production and recognition of individual women's narratives as purveyors of truth, as if discourse when it comes from injured parties has nothing to do with power, as if it isn't rhetoric, like it is when it comes from dominant social positions. It isn't that Brown doesn't think it's important that marginalized voices are heard and that narratives are used in politics, that is, that we actively demonstrate the personal is political. It's simply that she realizes this isn't enough to affect change in a postmodern context, as it clings to naive, modernist notions of truth and of the subject. Producing academia based on women's perspectives is important, but they can't be treated as individual's accounts of truth, any more than we would treat the narratives of wealthy white men as signs of what reality is. Instead they should be taken as collective accounts of the world used to make political arguments. And we need new political spaces to make our feminist arguments political.

Now, this postmodern political space for feminists is not something she focuses on defining too specifically in the chapter, but this is what she tells us she's getting at:

"Postmodernity's dismantling of metaphysical foundations for justice renders us quite vulnerable to domination by technical reason unless we seize the opportunity this erosion also creates to develop democratic processes for formulating collective postepistemological and postontological judgments. Such judgments require learning how to have public conversations with each other, arguing from a vision about the common ("what I want for us") rather than from identity ("who I am"), and from explicitly postulated norms and potential common values rather than from false essentialism or unreconstructed private interest...I am suggesting that political conversation oriented toward diversity and the common, toward world rather than self, and involving conversion of one's knowledge of the world from a situated (subject) position into a public idiom, offers us the greatest possibility of countering postmodern social fragmentations and political disintegrations.

My final point in this very long summary, is just that I like the idea, as a way of getting away from the trap of identity politics discussed in the first chapter, but I just don't know how it would work in such a cynical political society. Vision and ideas for the collective are openly mocked in our political culture. Remember how almost half of the United States thought it was ok to vote for a political party that openly mocked something as rudimentary as community organizers? I guess I just question how politically salient her approach could be. But then again, I guess we won't begin by reaching out to conservative republicans who don't think helping the collective is admirable...we'll have to start with parties who are a little more sympathetic. 

Read More...

Summary only...