Anticipation of Nostalgia. The Calculation of Transfiguration in Language, Literature and Fashion

PhD project by Cédric Weidmann

In the last 100 years, nostalgia has changed from a medical diagnosis of illness to a cultural technique. Instead of people, literary works, building forms, musical styles and fashions can now be "nostalgic" if they take on certain forms. The project explores how these forms come about and how, unlike other forms, they can negotiate chronopolitical positions. Especially in literature, which according to Lessing extends to the "field of time", the form of nostalgia also influences the operations of its understanding - for example, it alters the linguistic operation of recursion, which has earned it the accusation of contagion.

The fact that nostalgia is at the same time related to the future, futurity and expectation has become the main achievement, but also a commonplace, of nostalgia research over the last century. On the one hand, it is a symptom of (gloomy) expectations about the future; on the other hand, nostalgia is precisely an instrument with which the future can be shaped politically. Anticipation brings a third future to the fore. According to it, nostalgia would be something that itself has a future, that will always come back and has therefore always been anticipated, with consequences for every present: a life is lived with a view to a later transfiguration, a photo is taken for a subsequent nostalgia, and possibly language "lays out" its meaning not for immediate understanding, but with a view to a nostalgic reshaping of diachronic courses. And this aspect is built in: anticipation is inherent in nostalgia and prefigures it. With this interweaving of past and future, the anticipation of nostalgia occupies a key position in the cultural and social production of time, and becomes the central site of negotiation of a chronopolitics.

The project is divided into two parts. In the first, nostalgia is grasped as a cultural technique that possesses anticipatory properties or operationalisations: Nostalgia is a) always anticipated, b) self-aware, c) a pathology of form, and d) an aesthetic mode (filter). These characteristics can be demonstrated by means of literary and philosophical texts from the 18th to the 21st century. The second part deals with stagings of anticipations of nostalgia as they appear especially in recent times, in nostalgically refracted science fiction works of literature (Leif Randt), film (Her), design, architecture and music (Vaporwave). Here it becomes clear that nostalgia by no means only has to revalue the past at the expense of the future, but that with the help of its ability to anticipate - the qualities described in the first part - it is able to create the future in the first place.