{"id":1270,"date":"2016-08-31T08:43:07","date_gmt":"2016-08-31T14:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/?p=1270"},"modified":"2016-09-01T17:01:04","modified_gmt":"2016-09-01T23:01:04","slug":"nostalgia-and-the-eighties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/?p=1270","title":{"rendered":"Nostalgia and the Eighties"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"Max
Max Headroom, 20 minutes into the future<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Miami Vice. BladeRunner. Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Goonies. Top Gun. <\/em>We are all children of the eighties, due to an overpowering sense of nostalgia.<\/p>\n


\nThe word nostalgia<\/b> comes from Greek roots: nostos<\/i>, meaning \u201cto return home,\u2019 and algos<\/i>, meaning pain. In the late 17th<\/sup> century, the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer<\/a> recognized a malady plaguing the Swiss mercenaries who traded in foreign countries, and conceptualized it as a medical or neurological disease \u2013 a lethal kind of severe homesickness. By the 19th<\/sup> and the 20th<\/sup>centuries, there was a shift from the spatial to the temporal. The emotion of nostalgia is the reaction to the sad realization that time is irreversible. This emotion has staying power because the eighties was the last monoculture to exist before the emergence of the Internet.<\/p>\n

Nostalgia is a rather slippery concept that even the most astute and trenchant critics confess that it is a paradox. Nostalgia has been treated as a physical disorder, or a mental disorder, or just a feeling, or a symptom of the modern age. Basically, nostalgia is the backward glance through history, but it doesn\u2019t require a place or even a time that\u2019s real. Therefore, nostalgia isn\u2019t necessarily historical, tho it\u2019s been labeled as a \u201chistorical emotion.\u201d Nostalgia fuels parochial and cosmopolitan, as well as radical and conservative, moral and political imaginations. Nostalgia belongs neither to the present, nor to the past, much less the future, but it is tied to all three temporal zones. The aesthetics of nostalgia may be less a matter of simple memory, than a complex projection; the invocation of a partial and idealized history merging with a dissatisfaction with the present.<\/p>\n

The metaphysical structure of nostalgia is similar to the Fall, or the Expulsion from Paradise. Nostalgia is the incapacity to coincide with any moment of time, for it seeks consolation in a remote immemorial past, somehow superior to existence. Rather than a passing phenomenon, precipitated by a certain ideology, nostalgia is a structural reality that affects all perspectives \u2013 be it in the media or politics or art. Nostalgia has replaced nature as a referent in post-industrial culture<\/a>, as the result of a massive realization of the concept of history throughout all areas of thought.<\/p>\n

One of the reason critics disparage nostalgia is that it is basically an uncritical form of aesthetic judgment. We loved something unconditionally when we were young, that only means we were happy during our youth. It matters not if the 80s produced great or shitty films, it\u2019s just that those films reminded us of a happier time, and we unconsciously mix that fond memory with the film, music, comic books, etcetera. Another reason is that nostalgia is a mask of a self-serving insecurity, in which we yearn for something from the past, we are asserting that those things are still important, which implies that our lives are just as important, because those things constitute our identity. Worse yet, nostalgia is a lazy type of sentiment that is intolerant of anything new.<\/p>\n

The 80s are here again<\/b><\/p>\n

Every decade has its rhythm, but the eighties stand alone because it turned into a genre, with its own tropes \u2013 a transcendental cocktail mix of synth music, neon lights, video games and cocaine. Nostalgia exists for many different things, for romanticism, for the fifties, for pop.<\/p>\n

However, in the last decade or so, nostalgia has become commercialized in the mass media, a commercialization that might be understood as a true evasion of contemporary issues and problems. Commercial nostalgia teaches us to miss things we didn\u2019t really lose. Nostalgia is essentially the byproduct of cultural modernity, along with its alienation and lamented loss of tradition and community. Nostalgia is made palatable today by invoking as well as undercutting the perspective that sees exactly what it is \u2013 a comment on the present as much as on the past.<\/p>\n

\"So
So cheesy and so cool at the same time.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Because history no longer has any direction, nostalgia is different when creators refer to the eighties. When Picasso<\/a> quoted Cezanne<\/a>, it was because Cezanne was a marker in a historical progression. Today, in the Digital Age, we have commentaries like Kung Fury<\/a><\/em> on the last monoculture capable of producing a historical style.<\/p>\n

Our contemporary culture is shot through with nostalgia, and certain parts of it \u2013 the self-aware postmodern part \u2013 is all too aware of the risks and lures of nostalgia and seeks to expose those through irony.<\/p>\n

\"http:\/\/www.billboard.com\/files\/styles\/article_main_image\/public\/media\/lady-gaga-performance-mirrors-billboard-650.jpg\"
Lady Gaga as neo-80s icon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nostalgia has replaced transgression, or more correctly, nostalgia stimulates transgression now. Where Madonna stimulated transgression with provocative clothing and suggestive lyrics, Lady Gaga<\/a> accomplished the same by rehabilitating Madonna as a genre.<\/p>\n

Nostalgia is the death exhalation of art \u201cas we know it.\u201d It is the writing on the wall of the art as an art history. We were an analog world dreaming of digital in the eighties. Today, digitized, we dream ourselves backwards.<\/a><\/p>\n

It exists as simulated art through social media which is a double of traditional media, a media that exists only as a nostalgic reference to the idea of media and to the ideas of communication and social intercourse. These simulated media is a global phenomenon, but no longer fulfill the function of old media. They only serve to simulate the phenomenon of nostalgia. And within these simulations, this very heart is where the simulated art activity takes place. An activity itself nostalgic for the reality of activity in art.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Miami Vice. BladeRunner. Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Goonies. Top Gun. We are all children of the eighties, due to an overpowering sense of nostalgia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[15,13,2],"tags":[330,233,347,346,310],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1Af2X-ku","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1270"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1281,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions\/1281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}