Open Set 2012
Max Bruinsma
tral paradigms. Just as irony projects what is not said onto what is said, nostalgia projects an idealized past onto a disappointing present. The effect of both terms, of both affects, is unsettling. Of course, as Hutcheon observes too, there is undiluted nostalgia, which radically – and decisively without irony – rejects the present and obsessively works to reinstall the past. Disney’s Celebration, for instance, a gated community just outside Disney World, Florida, is a textbook retro-utopia, a really existing fantasy modeled on a 1950’s version of the American Dream. But in today’s ‘retro’ products, nostalgia and irony merge seamlessly. As Hutcheon remarks in another context: “invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into perspective, seen for exactly what it is – a comment on the present as much as on the past.” In its postmodern version, in short, nostalgia is “both called up, exploited and ironized.”
Utopia as agency In our context, this reminds us of Bloch’s critical view on psychoanalysis. Not coincidentally, the rise of postmodernism coincides with a renewed interpretation of Freud’s work, and it doesn’t
require too much imagination to interpret our contemporary fascination with his “necessarily retrospective” method as a sign of our culture’s uncomfortable relationship with the present. Nostalgia and irony are expressions of this discomfort – they undermine the here-and-now. “If the present is considered irredeemable,” says Hutcheon, “you can look either back or forward.” That is also the similarity between nostalgia and utopia – both reject the present, albeit in opposite directions. Still, nostalgia is not necessarily the opposite of utopia, as cultural historian Andreas Huyssen remarks. He sees a shift in our time in the “time-orientation of utopian imagination, from its futuristic pole to the pole of remembrance. Utopia and the past, rather than Utopia and the year 2000.” If, in other words, we imagine a better future now, it is that of the past. But that is a future without present, or worse, one that qualifies the present as a repressed failure. That is the present of today’s baby boomer, disillusioned in his past utopian fervor, who has abolished any idea of genuine engagement as “so nineteen sixties”. It is the present of “the prison of mere presence, in which we
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