Nostalgia, the cancellation of the future and the paradoxical archive

Abstract

The exhaustion of the notion of utopia — whose spirit based on the optimistic belief in a better future marked Western Modernity — opened space for another one that, progressively, gained centrality in contemporary culture: the notion of nostalgia (Fredric Jameson). On the one hand, this notion carries with it the idea that Modernity is an unfinished project (Jürgen Habermas), whose promises have not been realized, but in relation to which there is a constant return. On the other hand, and consequently, nostalgia is linked to the cultural perception of a certain exhaustion of historical temporality or the idea of progress. In short, if we are no longer certain that the future will come true, we are stuck in the present and, therefore, we have to remember, not only the past, but the present itself, in a kind of vicious cycle that can be read as a slow cancellation of the future (Bifo Berardi). From this cultural reading, critical perspectives suggest that the current media and cultural industries favor this impasse — configured as nostalgic — because they insist on familiar formulas that do nothing more than recover repeated models without offering an alternative for the production of heterogeneity (Mark Fisher). The archive then appears in a paradoxical dimension. On the one hand, it can be assumed that all media are means of registration that work, with general digitalization, the constitution of a universal archive that keeps everything. On the other hand, of what archive can we speak in a kind of an eternal present, with no alternatives, which only rewrites or overwrites the symbolic references of today? In view of this aporia, it is important for us to think here about how certain artistic approaches (the use of crackle in the music of Caretaker or Burial; the material archaeology of cinema in the work of Tacita Dean, the reproducibility of the archive in the work of Mark Leckey) have sought to expose the way in which the media materialize memory, approaches that, from a disruptive opening of the notion of nostalgia, question the temporality of the present and of history itself (Walter Benjamin).