“A Note on Nostalgia”

Bryan Turner

Turner argues that “nostalgia and nostalgic metaphors” have had a central role in “the
development of western civilization.” 147

Turner views nostalgia as central to the discussion of utopian and dystopian thinking.

“My main concern in this note is, however, to trace the evolution of nostalgia as a medical
and moral label which provided the basis for a specifically sociological version of nostalgic
metaphors in the late nineteenth century.” 147

“In literature, the most significant representative of the nostalgic disposition was Hamlet.”
148

In addition to the link between nostalgia and melancholy, Turner makes an interesting point
about the relationship between nostalgia and the multiplicity of social roles.
“Hamlet was distanced from reality as a consequence of his role playing and his adoption of
numerous social and theatrical parts, the notion that nostalgia and melancholy are associated
with disguise was fully expressed in Burton's The Anatomy of melancholy in 1621.” 148

“For the nostalgic, the world is alien.” 149

Turner argues that nostalgia is an ontological feature of the human condition, hence what he
calls “ontological nostalgia.” This condition is mainly a consequence of the human awareness
of death, and the subsequent desire to renounce that awareness.
“Because human beings are conscious and self-conscious, they are somewhat distanced from
their material environment by their very awareness of their finite condition as beings - unto -
death. We may therefore appropriately talk about an ontology of nostalgia as a fundamental
condition of human estrangement.” 150

“In modern cultures this nostalgic sense of the passing of time, finitude and death IS captured
by the widespread availability of photography. In her discussion of 'melancholy objects',
Susan Sontag drew attention to the relationship between photographs, sentimentality and
death when she noted that 'photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard,
scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgements by the generalised pathos
of looking at time past'.” 150

Turner distinguishes between four major dimensions of nostalgia or “the nostalgic paradigm.”
1. The sense of “historical decline and loss, involving a departure from some gold age of
'homefulness'.
Millenarianism is an example. Abrahamic religions also are part of this paradigm in their
pattern of fall and redemption, a nostalgia to an earlier pre-fall period of grace.

2. The sense of “the absence or loss of personal wholeness and moral certainty. In dimension,
human history is perceived in terms of a collapse of values which once provided the unity of
human relations knowledge and personal experience.” 150
Crucial to this development have been capitalism and urbanization.

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3. “The third aspect of the nostalgic paradigm is the sense of the loss of individual freedom
and autonomy with the disappearance of genuine social relationships. With the death of God
and the loss of moral coherence, the isolated individual is increasingly exposed to the
constraining social processes of modern institutionalized regulation which gradually
undermine the individual, who is strangled within the world of state bureaucracies.” 151
Max Weber and the iron cage metaphor is an example here, where structural differentiation,
the rationality of instrumental reason have an alienating effect on individuals.

4. “The final aspect of the nostalgic paradigm is the idea of a loss of simplicity, personal
authenticity and emotional spontaneity. The primitive emotions which were once celebrated
in peasant festivals have been subdued first by the culture of the court and finally by the
restraint of bourgeois society.” 151
This entails a celebration of primitive pre-modern values of spontaneity, gluttony and
libertarianism that have collapsed under Bourgeois social values and refined manners, hence
for example the celebration of Dionysus in contemporary thought.
“From Freudian psychoanalysis, the critical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse claimed that
civilization was also bought at the cost of personal freedom and sexual spontaneity;
contemporary civilization was a political system of surplus repression.” 151

This theme of ontological nostalgia has been a persistent theme permeating much of Western
thought, culture and philosophy. Its underpinning was the contradiction between the
individual will to life and the forms of life and behaviour concordant upon the individual’s
social and communal association. Nostalgia incorporates a “pessimistic view of the
relationship between the content of human will and the forms of social relationship” 151

Homelessness, alienation and the reification by modern culture have all been crucial to the
nostalgic dimension.

In the American context “one might argue that the quest for a return to a safe harbour has
dominated the nostalgic politics of the Republican Party under President Reagan, since we
might see contemporary American politics as a quest for the moral security of colonial
society. Within a broader framework, the whole fundamentalist movement is in part a
nostalgic response of the structural modernism of capitalist society.” 152

Turner sums up major points in this article:

“I have argued that the nostalgic paradigm is a persistent and prevalent feature of western
culture, in literature, art, medical history and social theory. The nostalgic mood is of particular
importance m contemporary cultures in association with the loss of rural simplicity,
traditional stability and cultural integration following the impact of industrial, urban, capitalist
culture on feudal social organization. Within a broader philosophical perspective, it has been
suggested that the theme of alienation in human societies represents a form of ontological
nostalgia which perceives human beings because of their consciousness as alienated from the
life world of the human species.” 152-3

The contemporary critique of mass culture, or the postmodern Baudrillardian loss of

authenticity are all instances of the ontology of nostalgia that runs through contemporary
thought.

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Turner adds that “certain cultures might be especially prone to nostalgic crises,” citing as an
example of nostalgia communities “the white colonial settler societies of the old
Commonwealth” 153

Usually these communities deplore the loss of an earlier utopian home devoid of the problems
of cultural otherness. Similar tendencies run in some post-imperial circles looking back on
earlier glory days.
“For many white Australians and New Zealanders, 'home' is located in a lost place in a lost
time and thereby assumes a Utopian dimension, since that home is free from the conflicts of
multiculturalism, political pluralism and ethnic conflict. We might also assume nostalgic
periods to be associated with the loss of colonies, or at least with the memory of such a loss.”
154

Turner reminds us that although nostalgia has mostly been associated with conservative ideas
and elitist agendas, one has also to recognize that “nostalgia may play a highly ambivalent
role in social criticism and political protest. By converting the past into a Utopian home stead,
nostalgia may lay the foundations for a radical critique of the modern as a departure from
authenticity.” 154

Turner ends by suggesting the affinities between major philosophies and the nostalgic
dimension. Marxism, for instance, articulates one version of the fall-redemption pattern. Also,
Nietzsche’s commitment to pre-Socratic drama (Dionysus, Apollo) is an expression of
“German enthusiasm for nostalgic Hellenism.” 155