Nostalgia

Nostalgia, in the Lacanian sense, as the impossible desire to retrieve a lost—a love, as it is sometimes figured—object. The object has been made irretrievable to the subject because the object in question is and can never be the same as the object of the subject’s desire. Nevertheless, the relationship—the dialectic—that binds—links—subject to object endures, remains, no matter that the nature of the relationship is at the mercy of forces that the subject cannot control. The relationship endures because the subject has cathected itself onto the object—the subject has invested the object with an emotional significance, often a significance disproportionate to the object’s “real” value. The object continues to mean to the subject, the subject retains its meaning to the object, regardless, because of the power of the subject’s emotional attachment. The effect of cathexis is such that no matter, as Gilles Deleuze would insist, the difference (as it pertains to the object) that overdetermines repetition, the object cannot be overcome. The object of nostalgia, however, is subject to difference in more than one way: not only is the object made different by repetition but the object can now only (in its difference) be located in a distinct time and place—the object has, as it were, moved, relocated, taken up residence in an other time, a time that can only be understood as anachronistic, a time inflected with a set of affective and political investments that, as a rule, do not reflect the facticity of the time. Anachronism as the making-ideal-of-the-time that-was; an idealization that can only be apprehended in its nostalgia, that is, to phrase the matter euphemistically, an idealized nostalgia that comes to take on the status of truth.

Such nostalgia is the desire to cling, against all economic good sense, to that object that is being lost. This is fiction in which fidelity to late industrial capitalism persists. In fact, this mode of capitalist production that is the object of nostalgia, has, already, long since been lost. Nostalgia summoned up, instrumentalized even, as a bulwark against the machinations—if such an industrialist pun might be permitted—of capitalism’s imperious forward march. That mode of being that has been put under erasure by technology and the rapacious appetite of vulture capitalism: capitalism as destructive in its entirety, and, as such, rather too destructive of a particular moment. This nostalgia is the desire to safeguard that mode of capitalist production, that moment conceived here as late industrial capitalism, which has, in the main, been rendered redundant but whose moment is not (yet fully) passed, certainly not in its entirety. The rusty remnants of a certain capitalist spirit, exhausted, beaten, but defiant in its refusal to submit to the relentless advance that is postindustrial capital. This is late industrial capitalism as, in Eliot’s sense, “the burnt-out ends of smoky days.” Nothing left but cinders and ashes, as Jacques Derrida might have it.

These remains—the almost completely erased traces of their economic kind—stand as the last vestiges of a world that has passed. A world that has effectively passed except for those final remnants that are trying, in vain, it would seem, to set themselves against ruin. This nostalgia made of ruins, this nostalgia for the ruins, this nostalgia against the ruination of the ruins. After all, is the effect of postindustrial capitalism not a collection of “burnt-out” industries, economies of former mill towns laid low, manufacturing industries remembered only because the old factories have become the strongholds of drug addicts, the homeless, and youth seeking respite from all forms of authority? Or, old warehouses remodeled as lofts on the upper floors, with coffee shops, niche restaurants, e-bike shops on the ground floor. In other words, out of the ruins of industrial capitalism is born the playground of urban hipsters. All this destruction wrought by industrial capitalism is now made into grist for the mill—pun intended—of the postindustrial and postmodern creative economy.

The postmodern economy is one that is largely alien to the generation that came into adulthood in an economically prosperous postwar America. That generation of white America that fled the city in search of racially segregated suburbia where they would be spared the influx of blacks and other new immigrants who were trying to make a life for themselves in those self-same cities. That generation of mainstream America who barely tolerated the emergent counterculture (the likes of Kerouac, Ginsberg, James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, James Baldwin, Sly and the Family Stone, and so on) could certainly not conceive of a “creative laboring class,” artists, musicians, painters, poets, who turned abandoned factories into living spaces. Abandoned factories transformed into lofts was not what that generation anticipated, the postwar heirs and beneficiaries of the so-called Greatest Generation. With good reason, because theirs was a generation that could not imagine creativity in this new capitalist mode: This new, alien mode of capitalism, this unprecedented form of culture-making, of virtual production, of making an eco-friendly urban life. Of making profit out of the ruins of the world that postindustrial capitalism had destroyed. Of the coming gentrification that would price black Americans and new immigrants out of what had long been their neighborhoods.

All this, we can say, is an American generation’s nostalgia for an immanent capitalism. A visible, tangible, productive capitalism; that is, a capitalist economy where products, the things Americans buy, their cars, their washing machines, their refrigerators and their photocopiers, are made in the continental United States. A nostalgia for that economic mode—which is of course also a moment in capitalism—when American cars (Ford, GM, Chrysler) used to roll off the assembly line in Detroit (before the Japanese “invasion,” led by Toyota, overtook the US car industry, whereafter Toyota came to dominate the international car market); when steel was manufactured in Pittsburgh and not imported from China; when American ingenuity led the way globally so that the Xerox company of Rochester, New York, was so dominant as to make of “Xerox” as much a product as a verb (“xeroxing”), so synonymous was the work of photocopying with the company’s name. That moment when industrial capitalism, in cities such as Cleveland, Ohio, with its manufacturing plants, and Gary, Indiana, with its billowing, polluting smokestacks, guaranteed jobs for white workers. (Jobs that, at least for a couple of generations, offered the security of lifetime employment; hence the term “company town.”)