Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope

4. From Disease to Desire: The Afflicted Amalgamation of Music and Nostalgia

From Disease to Desire The Afflicted Amalgamation of Music and Nostalgia MICKEY VALLEE Despite its original diagnosis as an “afflicted imagination” enkindling despair and death in its victims, nostalgia was adopted as a musical device in Classical , Romantic, and early popular music. In this chapter, I trace nostalgia’s migration from its diagnosis as a crippling disease to its paradoxical incorporation into musical composition. It Isn’t What It Was Contemporary conjectures about nostalgia describe the emotion as an empowering state of self-awareness that dissociates the past from the pain of its historical consequences. But the definition of nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Where once nostalgia was diagnosed as an “afflicted imagination” (Hofer 1934, 381) associated with displacement and depression, it has recently been portrayed as a technology that weaves disparate historical moments within a singular narrative. Because nostalgia is so wholly subjective, it is tactless to venture into objectivist descriptions—indeed, we have all suffered from nostalgia, yet we may find that defining it is an arduous task. An affective state entwined somewhere between emotion, memory, and identity, nostalgia is less a direct psychological referent to the totality of a past experience than a series of faded snapshots that project full features of one’s self within the bygone event’s imaginary space. Such a space, in turn, reassembles the image of 85 4 86 NOSTALGIA the self in the present. According to Davis’s (1979) pioneering sociological study, while nostalgia resembles the optimistic fantasy of a better time, it is a time we have already known. It reassures us of past happiness and accomplishment and, since these still remain on deposit, as it were, in the bank of our memory, it simultaneously bestows upon us a certain current worth, however much present circumstances may obscure it or make it suspect. (34) Nostalgia, as Davis has it, alienates us from the present by way of an intensified extraction of affects from our past, but such alienation contributes toward identity preservation. Nostalgia doesn’t cause us to suffer, Davis says, but rather enables us to overcome our current social discontinuities with an adherence to the self’s superior ability at surviving past experiences; nostalgia , in other words, weaves an optimistic thread of continuity throughout the experiential disruptions of identity. It allows us to interrogate the past, not as a repository of veridical events, but as memorial planes of certain affectual transcendence: an assurance that I was “thereness” on the “beachness .” Davis justifies his sanguine approach to alienation with the triumph of the self, which guarantees the protraction of identity and, as a corollary of protraction, prepares identity to overcome prospective disruptions in peaceful harmony between the self and world. By armouring the self with a vision of its own history without consequence, nostalgia is the cognitive technology that empowers the self as the triumphant autonomous figure unaffected by its social ground. Davis designates the autonomous figure as the “secret self,” which “gives testimony to one’s prescience, to a heightened sensitivity and oneness with the deepest impulses of an age” (34). And since this “secret self” is also a social being (if we agree that keeping a secret anticipates the social art of confession), it will inevitably encounter other secret selves and share with them their secret spaces in present time. The exposing of the secret self to another person occurs within what Davis calls a “nostalgic memory exchange,” which discloses the “wonderment of the revelation of how much more alike than different our ‘secret’ pasts are” so that we experience multiple shared memories “ad infinitum in paradoxical regress” (134). Nostalgia , according to Davis, exhibits a constructive social function. It allows us to regress into the fantasy of our past, yet it is a regression that causes us to resurface and share our memory with other people. Simply, as much as nostalgia is an always-already of the human condition, as much as we are interpellated as the subject of our own past, we find points of articulation in these subjective regressions to connect with others based on the mutual affects we share. We can, as perhaps a cultural apologist would argue, model a community through the ostensible alienation. Indeed, music appears as the commensurate cultural alignment with nostalgia because either can be approached as the affective movement of pure memory. In other words, because music can relay the historical instance without the burden...