Borrowed Nostalgia

(Quite the rough draft, and as always, fully incomplete.)

My wife and I recently had our first child. It is quite the experience, and has really forced me to look back on my life as I look to the future of my daughter's. As with any retrospection, a sense of nostalgia comes into play (as does a sense of embarrassment.) 

As long as I have studied art, and maybe before, I have had a negative view of nostalgia, as it runs contrary to Modernist ideals. As far as I can tell, it runs counter to Postmodern ideology as well, in that the recycling of forms used in PM art is an act of criticism, not fondness. Now, I'm not sure what kind of weight it holds, but I have heard people try to add additional "post"s in front of "postmodern" - i.e., post-postmodern, post-post-postmodern, ad infinitum.; I have never really stuck around to find out what they are pretending to know, but I imagine it must have to do with a re-using of imagery with a more sympathetic approach. Unfortunately, this type of appropriation is doomed to become idolatry or fetishism, and is a surrogate for the womb of the unoriginal, those who fashion pleasurable the stale taste of aestheticized consumerism. Appropriation of this type belongs to the plagiarist.

It seems that the ideas that Nicolas Bourriaud presented in his 2002 masterpiece, Postproduction, have trickled down through a mass of bad artists and good programmers to be misused in the feeble hands of the general consumer, who now believes him/herself to be "creative." Creative, yes, but an artist, no. An act of plagiarism is an act of creation (just as an act of destruction is), but the action of art is an act of synthesis. The former is only a vampiric or zombic act - consumption that creates more consumers, all of whom where once alive, but are now dead; the latter is an act of agriculture, a consumption (of seemingly dead resources) whose product is life. [Here may be a good place to think of Zizek's interpretation of "un" something being worse than it's opposite - the undead being a horrific alternative to the alive.]

Bourriaud made a great case for what may have been the last wave of truly postmodern artist from the 90's in Postproduction, and set up a believable scenario in which we can see the actions of the DJ and computer programmer, selectors and re-arrangers (remixers) of given lexicons, as artistic creators. Bourriaud draws his argument out in such a way that we tend to believe him we he tells us that even flipping the channels on the television is an act of creation because it is an act of selection. Again, creation, yes, art, no.

The artistic DJ and Programmer rearrange their forms in a semiotic way that synthesizes new, intelligible structures capable of becoming fodder for future utterance by others; the plagiaristic flipping of television (or Youtube) channels creates only a virtual cache of wasted time for the masturbatory voyeur.

This is a thin line that I am drawing, but a line that must be drawn. It is a line so thin that often is not recognizable until the artist intentions are spelled out. To make the line more bold, imagine the difference between a PhD thesis and a Third Grade book report.

To bring this back to the subject at hand, nostalgia, we only need to look at the current state of photography to find that nostalgia is no longer readily available, thus must be borrowed. 

In today's modernized countries, essentially everyone has a camera(phone) with him/her at all time (with a virtually infinite digital film roll), which allows for everyone to take pictures of everything all the time. Paired with this phenomena is the new social forum, the social media site - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. - marketplaces for selling [giving] one's image(s) to others. The images are small, numerous (almost infinite), and seemingly fleeting. To view them is similar to watching someone flipping through a thousand television stations and only catching one frame of each show. This fragmented state seems to lie at the foundation of postmodernism, but does not, because it lacks an unapologetic ahistoricism.

The Fauxmodernist, the plagiarizer, seeks to have a history, a stable identity to which she may return, she longs for nostalgia, but there is no nostalgia available. Her history changed so rapidly that no pairing of time/place/technology is available. There are no Polaroids in a box under a bed of the trip to the Grand Canyon; there is a crashed harddrive in a landfill somewhere with 1.2 megapixel pictures of her at a mall which has gone out of business. There are too many pictures on her Facebook page to reminisce over, she is too busy maintaining her current identity with new images. But she knows these images lack substance (therefore so does she). In order to make up for this lack the plagiarist borrows nostalgia from his/her parents; she adds "filters" to make her status update photo look like it was taken in 1976 - in a week, in might have well been. 

There is no "320x240 Logitec webcam" filter on Instagram or similar apps; such a filter would have no significance to speak of. Instead, the signifiers from another era are mimicked in order to simulate the feeling of a meaningful photograph. The photographs may hold some interest, but have no punch, no lasting impression; in the terms of Roland Barthes, they may have some level of studium, but no real punctum.

This may be a bit of a stretch, of course the youngest generations may still develop nostalgia for places/spaces, but I seriously doubt that they form the same sense of nostalgia for past times, technologies and media the way older generations do.