Nostalgia rises to importance as a cultural practice as culture becomes more and more diffuse, more and more a “structure of feeling” (Williams n.d.), as culture takes on the power of “distance” that comes of displacing speakers-the power to flatten distinctions, to blur genres, to unname the practices of the social world so that they look like nature (Barthes 1957). Culture is more and more unspoken and unnamed. Painted onto the surface of things, it passes us by as a blur of images and we “read” it instantaneously as if it is a photographic image already “written” and framed. As Jameson (1983) has argued, the cultural decentering and fragmentation of our present is experienced as a breakdown in our sense of time. As a result, the present rises before us in the ultravivid mode of fascination - a fascination that is experienced as a loss, an unreality (or what Baudrillard [1981] calls “hyperreality”). In a world of loss and unreality, nostalgia rises to importance as “the phantasmal, parodic rehabilitation of all lost frames of reference” (Foster 1985:90)
Kathleen Stewart, 1988. Nostalgia - a polemic. Cultural Anthropology 3(3):227-241.
