In a previous blog post, Andreas Ottemo discussed the centrality of nostalgia in geek culture, manifested both as content in series like Stranger Things, in the constant remake and reboots of old video games and in the trading of ‘vintage’ toys at geek cons like Comic Con. In this post, Andreas reflects on late literary scholar and cultural theorist Svetlana Boym’s proposal to distinguish between different forms of nostalgia, and what this might mean in relation to geek culture.
In our geek project, nostalgia has come up in a number of different ways. Sometimes, it seems quite benign, as when middle-aged male cosplayers enjoy flying replicas of Star Wars spaceships at geek cons, fulfilling their boyhood dreams, and sometimes less so, as when geeks rage over a new He-Man series not being true to the original. Together with the “paradoxes” surrounding geek nostalgia already reflected on in the blog post mentioned above, I find this intriguing, and so have continued reading the literature on nostalgia. Doing this, the work of literary scholar and cultural theorist Svetlana Boym keeps popping up. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman draws on Boym’s work in his last book Retrotopia and, more related to geek culture, Jordan S. Carroll uses Boym to shed light on geek nostalgia in the chapter “The Lifecycle of Software Engineers: Geek Temporalities and the Spirit of Capital”. They both employ Boym’s distinction between two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective, a distinction that I will return to below.
It is in her 2001 book The future of nostalgia and later in the 2007 essay “Nostalgia and its discontents” that Boym presents her approach to theorising nostalgia. Her starting point is an etymological mapping of the word nostalgia itself. Its roots come from the Greek words nostos, which means “return home” and algia, which means “longing”. However, as Boym humoristically points out, the word nostalgia is not actually Greek, but pseudo-Greek or nostalgically Greek. It was in fact coined as a medical term in a dissertation from 1688, and was considered a curable disease that one could treat. Common categories of people who suffered from nostalgia were students studying abroad and Swiss soldiers stationed abroad. The last were thought to be curable through journeys to the Swiss alps!
Restorative and reflective nostalgia
Boym points out that although the originary conception of nostalgia signals that nostalgia is about longing for a place (homeland), nostalgia today is usually about a “yearning for a different time”. At the same time, she points out that it is wrong to think of nostalgia as an antimodern sentiment. Instead, it is closely connected to modernity, and can be considered a “mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility” (2007, p.10) closely connected to the sense of progress in modernity. She also suggests that nostalgia can in fact be not only retrospective but prospective as well. As she writes: “The fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future. The consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales.” (p.8).
This does not mean that she neglects the negative qnd even dangerous aspects of nostalgia, and this is where her distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia comes in. Her basic idea is that restorative nostalgia can be understood as putting the emphasis on the nostos (homecoming) in nostalgia, while reflective nostalgia emphasises algia, the longing itself. Restorative nostalgia is dangerous because in its longing for “simpler times” or a lost home, “it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one” (p.10). Or, as she writes in her book: “What drives restorative nostalgia is not the sentiment of distance and longing but rather the anxiety about those who draw attention to historical incongruities between past and present and thus question the wholeness and continuity of the restored tradition” (p. 44-45). Importantly, for Boym, “restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition” (2001, p.13). As such, “restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals [and it] takes itself dead seriously” (p.13, 15). In a sense, this is the nostalgia of Trump, and Making America Great Again.
Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is playful and self-aware in its emphasising the longing itself. As Boym puts it, it “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity” (p.13). It “can be ironic and humorous” and reflective nostalgia “does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home”. It knows that the home it is idealising is perhaps partly fictive. Nostalgics of this kind “are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home is in ruins or, on the contrary, has just been renovated and gentrified beyond recognition”.
Restorative and reflective nostalgia in geek culture
Relating this discussion to our project, it could be argued that both reflective and restorative nostalgia animate geek culture. Certainly, there is a lot of self-reflective, humoristic, and playful nostalgia going on. We see this manifested in YouTube channels like Nostalgi & Nördkultur, that deliberately and explicitly revels in nostalgia and is very aware of its longing. One could also argue that a lot of the toxic aspects of geek culture are connected to a form of restorative nostalgia. This is the nostalgia that cannot allow Ariel to be black, women to have lead roles in a Ghostbusters movie, or that feels a need to cut out all women from The Last Jedi.
In a sense, the nostalgic aspects of geek culture can hence, with Boym, be divided into a playful, self-aware reflective nostalgia that is unproblematic, and a defensive, aggressive restorative nostalgia that problematically gatekeeps geek culture through insisting on a return to a “truer” or more originary cultural form.
Ultimately, however, we fear that Boym’s separation between a good/harmless reflective nostalgia and a bad/aggressive restorative nostalgia might not be so easy to separate in geek culture. As she herself points out, there are similarities and overlaps between the two forms. Comparing them, she says that “Restorative and reflective nostalgia might overlap in their frames of reference but do not coincide in their narratives and plots of identity. In other words, they can use the same triggers of memory and symbols, the same Proustian madeleine cookie, but tell different stories about it” (p.15). While Boym here immediately re-erects the dividing wall between her two nostalgias, we are not so sure that the sharing of “triggers of memory and symbols” is so unproblematic. Or to phrase this differently: The question we are struggling with now is whether the harmless indulging in “rosy” childhood memories is in fact so innocent. Does not this nostalgia also underpin and legitimise a more problematic and perhaps aggressive clinging on to a lost past, in a less ironic register?
Or what do you think? Please comment below!