The Modalities of Nostalgia

Current Sociology http://csi.sagepub.com/ The Modalities of Nostalgia Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley Current Sociology 2006 54: 919 DOI: 10.1177/0011392106068458 The online version of this article can be found at: http://csi.sagepub.com/content/54/6/919 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: International Sociological Association Additional services and information for Current Sociology can be found at: Email Alerts: http://csi.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://csi.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://csi.sagepub.com/content/54/6/919.refs.html >> Version of Record - Nov 2, 2006 What is This? Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 The Modalities of Nostalgia Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley Loughborough University CS abstract: Nostalgia has been viewed as the conceptual opposite of progress, against which it is negatively viewed as reactionary, sentimental or melancholic. It has been seen as a defeatist retreat from the present, and evidence of loss of faith in the future. Nostalgia is certainly a response to the experience of loss endemic in modernity and late modernity, but the authors argue that it has numerous manifestations and cannot be reduced to a singular or absolute definition. Its meaning and significance are multiple, and so should be seen as accommodating progressive, even utopian impulses as well as regressive stances and melancholic attitudes. Its contrarieties are evident in both vernacular and media forms of remembering and historical reconstruction. The authors argue that these contrarieties should be viewed as mutually constitutive, for it is in their interrelations that there arises the potential for sociological critique. keywords: modalities ✦ modernity ✦ nostalgia The temporal dichotomies of classical sociology asserted a severe, if not complete rupture between modern and premodern societies, and were largely weighted in favour of the present over the past in their theorizations of this radical historical transition. Assumptions of irreversible rupture created an indisposition to attend in a more balanced way to patterns of continuity across time, for change and movement away from the past were the key issues of focus. Positive valuations of present over past were based not only on views of the inevitability of linear progress forward to an improved future, but were also supported by evolutionism and historicism, and later by static functionalist paradigms and theories of modernization. Belief in the inevitability of progress was bolstered in its orientation to the future by the generation of its antithesis – a nostalgic yearning for the past – and yet, as the ideological components of the dogma of progress have been steadily critiqued, it is notoriously difficult to know where to turn for any viable alternative. We may look back on Current Sociology ✦ November 2006 ✦ Vol 54(6): 919–941 © International Sociological Association SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) DOI: 10.1177/0011392106068458 919 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 the variety of different positions that were developed in response to the abrupt social transitions experienced during modernity, ranging from wholesale acceptance through gradual adjustment to either melancholy over unchangeable forms of social malaise or arguments for further radical change, but all of these seem flawed in some way or another, and so not available for adoption without considerable change and revision. In the face of this perturbation, we feel it useful to think again about progress’s conceptual opposite. In being negatively othered as its binary opposite, nostalgia became fixed in a determinate backwards-looking stance. This not only closed down lines of active relation to the past, but also valorized what was set up as its single, inescapable alternative, facilitated convenient versions of the past in favour of the present, and left the stage free for only avowedly conservative reactions to modern times. Nostalgia became associated with a defeatist attitude to present and future, appearing tacitly to acquiesce in the temporal ruptures of modernity by its very assumption of this attitude. Nostalgia was also conceived as seeking to attain the unattainable, to satisfy the unsatisfiable. If a dogmatic belief in progress entailed an ardent longing for the future, nostalgia as its paired inversion entailed only an ardent longing for the past. It is, then, as if nostalgia arises only in compensation for a loss of faith in progress, and for what is socially and culturally destroyed in the name of progress. In longing for what is lacking in a changed present, nostalgia for a lost time clearly involves yearning for what is now not attainable, simply because of the irreversibility of time; but to condemn nostalgia solely to this position leaves unattended not only more general feelings of regret for what time has brought, but also more general questions for how the past may actively engage with the present and future. The temporal emphasis in modernity has always been on relentless supersession and movement beyond existing conditions and circumstances. This modernist emphasis leaves no space, remedial or otherwise, for dealing with the experience of loss. It is as if this experience, being negatively valued, has simply to be overcome, regardless of the pain and pathos that may be involved. The greatest temporal value in modernity is on what is temporary, and this disorientation from any sense of continuity or durability increases our sense of ethical perturbation by cutting away the grounds for active dialogue between past and present. All that is left is the negativity of nostalgia – as if, in the headlong tilt of time, all we can do is sigh and lament. This suggests that we need either to reconfigure the concept of nostalgia or move beyond it if we are to deal more adequately with the experience of loss. The experience of loss is endemic to living in modernity, regardless of whatever version of it applies in any particular time or place. Whether 920 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia through war, revolution or regime change, mass involuntary migration and emigration, or less dramatically through social mobility or social redevelopment and the dispersion of existing communities built up over time, change and attendant feelings of loss have altered how the past is seen and considered. This cannot be subsumed entirely within a sense of nostalgia, not least because feelings of loss are at times commingled with a sense of social gain or liberation, or with efforts to regain what has been lost in new ways that actively engage with the process or consequences of change. Modernity has changed the very conception of loss along with the compensations offered for it, such as nationalism or invented traditions, but loss, lack and longing do not have any singular or absolute condition in modernity. It follows that this is the case with nostalgia, since nostalgia is the composite feeling of loss, lack and longing. Rather than dismissing it as a concept, we should perhaps reconfigure it in terms of a distinction between the desire to return to an earlier state or idealized past, and the desire not to return but to recognize aspects of the past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future. Nostalgia can then be seen as not only a search for ontological security in the past, but also as a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present. This opens up a positive dimension in nostalgia, one associated with desire for engagement with difference, with aspiration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lacking in modernity. Nostalgia can be both melancholic and utopian. It is vital that this distinction is not conceived as yet another sociological dichotomy, for it is the way these two dimensions of nostalgia inform each other, in any particular case, that is important. There are cases where past-fixated melancholic reactions to the present prevail, and others where utopian longings drift free of any actual ontological basis in the present; but for us, in rethinking the concept, the key point of interest lies in the mutually constitutive interrelations of both dimensions of nostalgia, since it is there that the potential for sociological critique arises. In this article, we develop our rethinking of nostalgia as a sociological phenomenon by critically assessing how it has predominantly been viewed, how it figures as a concept of temporality, and how in its media forms it has been considered in the field of study now associated with social memory.1 Nostalgic Assessments The term nostalgia derives etymologically from the Greek nostos, meaning to return home, and algia, meaning a painful condition (Davis, 1979: 1). It was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofner, in the 17th century, as a diagnostic label for what was then considered a disease with 921 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 symptoms ranging from melancholia and weeping to anorexia and suicide. The apparent disease was related to prolonged and usually involuntary absences from home. Gradually, over the next two centuries, nostalgia became semantically unmoored from its medical basis, subsequently entering into both academic and popular vocabulary as a term referring to ‘capriciously sentimental and variously commodified’ forms of the past (Grainge, 2002: 20). By the time debate over the alleged condition and diagnostic uses of the term disappeared from medical discourse in the late 19th century, its metaphorical application, associated with a sort of homesickness for a lost past, had become its dominant meaning in ordinary parlance. This involved a shift from spatial dislocation to temporal dislocation, and the sense of feeling oneself a stranger in a new period that contrasted negatively with an earlier time in which one felt, or imagined, oneself at home. The metaphorical use was always aided by the multiple crossovers of sense between people’s orientations to time–space coordinates (as in the commonplace deixical uses of the phrases ‘here and now’ to denote the immediate present, and ‘distant past’ to denote the opposite of temporal proximity) yet over time that which the term stood in for became what was predominantly meant by the actual term itself. Following this development, nostalgia has been used in many fields of study as a critical tool to interrogate the articulation of the past in the present, and in particular, to investigate sentimentally inflected mediated representations of the past, perhaps most of all where there is an element of commercial exploitation at stake. Deployment of the category in such different academic domains as psychology, history and cultural studies creates difficulties of application and reference within a coherent explanatory framework. Taking it at its simplest, as a specifically modern concept nostalgia has been used to identify both a sense of personal loss and longing for an idealized past, and a distorted public version of a particular historical period or a particular social formation in the past. In much of the most recent work, nostalgia has been closely linked with the notion of collective, social or cultural memory as a way of attempting to explain how memories are generated, altered, shared and legitimated within particular sociocultural environments, yet in both senses it is connected with the characteristic features of modernity, such as its relentless social uprooting and erosion of time-honoured stabilities, while both the phenomenon itself and commentary on it have intensified proportionately to the acceleration of social and cultural change during modernity and late modernity. Historical acceleration has created a new sense of time, involving what Todd Gitlin has called ‘a new velocity of experience, a new vertigo’ (Gitlin, 1980: 233), which is in part associated with the construction and reconstruction of events by the mass media.2 Nostalgia is a form of reaction to 922 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia the velocity and vertigo of modern temporality. It rejects its insistently positive valuation of the temporary and transient. In the face of this valuation, a desire to imaginatively return to earlier times is then felt to correlate with an acute dissatisfaction with the present, and to involve an attempt to recapture a putative continuity and coherence unavailable in the fragmented modern or late modern environment (Smith, 1998; Lowenthal, 1989: 21). This is one side of the story. Nostalgia may also be seen as seeking a viable alternative to the acceleration of historical time, one that attempts a form of dialogue with the past and recognizes the value of continuities in counterpart to what is fleeting, transitory and contingent. Longing for an idealized past has been considered in two, quite opposed ways. On the one hand, it can be viewed as potentially dangerous in that it closes down the transactional value of the past in the present and results in various degrees of social amnesia (see e.g. Doane and Hodges, 1987). There are various versions of this argument. For example, in considering the difficulties of developing or relying on a nostalgic relationship to the past, Svetlana Boym suggests that ‘nostalgia too easily mates with banality, functioning not through stimulation, but by covering up the pain of loss in order to give a specific form of homesickness and to make homecoming available on request’ (Boym, 2001: 339). As such it fails both historical knowledge and the historical imagination. For Jameson, an active relation to the past has become almost impossible in our contemporary condition, where we have lost a sense of historical location and are locked into an endless succession of depthless presents (Jameson, 1991; see also Huyssen, 1995). On the other hand, nostalgia can be valued as potentially democratic, opening up new spaces for the articulation of the past and acting as a mode of assimilating this to the rapidly changing modern environment (see Baer, 2001; Davis, 1977). This different form of valuation begins to acknowledge that nostalgia is not inherently negative; there are other, more favourably inclined ways of considering it. It may be ‘shamelessly exploited’ by those whom Jacques Le Goff has called the ‘nostalgia-merchants’, but a broad public interest in collective memory can also be seen as an expression of the fear of social amnesia, even when this is ‘awkwardly expressed in the taste for the fashions of earlier times’ (Le Goff, 1992: 95). Nostalgia is centrally concerned with the concept of loss. Most of the literature on nostalgia refers to a loss of memory or historicity (Baudrillard, 1994: 44). Jameson (1991: 281) suggests that nostalgia involves the prioritization of positive accounts of the past to the exclusion of less than romantic aspects of experience. History may then have little or nothing to do with its reality, while mediated representations of the ‘past’ may hamper the development of historical awareness. Postmodernist and poststructuralist accounts of nostalgia successfully problematize the mediated 923 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 nature of contemporary understandings of the past and the tenuous links they may have with historical realities and historical meanings. They also generally recognize how the articulation of the past in the media is integral to contemporary temporality. It is, however, too easy to see in this relationship a narcissistic presentism, or a drastic loss of engagement with historical time. Rather than dismissing media representations of the past in this way, we may derive from them a more complex understanding of relations between time’s traces and historical reconstructions, including the possibilities of irony and play in rethinking history and our various relationships to it. To conceive of nostalgia as the defining feature of an amnesiac culture necessarily entails the degradation of social and cultural memory. Again, this acknowledges only the negative components of nostalgia, confining its identification to such mass cultural tendencies as surface style, stereotype, kitsch and pastiche. The critique of media nostalgia and retro cultural activations of the past pays close attention to the politics of historical representation, involving questions of relative meaning, perspective and understanding as well as stratified forms of social remembering. The problem is its analytical one-sidedness. Here there is more than a passing resemblance to earlier forms of mass cultural criticism where the media audience was homogenized and atomized at one and the same time, so being stripped of active participation in everyday historical consciousness. On the other hand, in examining how media texts communicate versions of the past, we should avoid the postmodernist mistake of bracketing all history with subjectivist relations to it and intertextual representations of it (Hutcheon, 1989: 113–14). This assumes that the past has no referents outside the circulation of textual representations, and that historical understanding is fatally compromised. Concerns over the way in which the past is depicted, or efforts made to ensure that opportunities exist for minority groups to have their experience and past represented, are then irrelevant and unnecessary. What is lost is any sense of what is politically at stake outside the texts themselves. Modernity is the experience of life lived in fragments, with the swift pace of change and the problems of semiotic overload contributing to the fragmentation of experience and our ability to assimilate it into an ongoing life-process. This can create the sense of contemporary life floating free from the past, becoming temporally unmoored and adrift. There is nothing inevitable or absolute about this. It can be countered in various ways. Relinkings of past and present can be sought after and newly elevated symbolic importance may be attached to various forms of time’s traces in the present. This has to be understood in terms of a cultural paradox, for as David Chaney has pointed out, while ‘in the onrushing progress of modernity there has been a simultaneous discarding of the 924 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia past’, nevertheless ‘in all sorts of ways mementoes and survivals mark a widespread concern for and sentimental treasuring of the past, of personal, communal and national heritages running through so much of everyday life’ (Chaney, 2002: 152). The cultural amnesia thesis sees only one side of this and so doesn’t grasp it as a paradox. It can be summed up by saying that the more the past appears to be discarded, the more is its significance elevated in personal life and public culture. This significance includes sentimental attachments to the past, but is certainly not confined to them. So we need to recognize the various ways in which people are involved in putting the situated past into some form of narrative order for themselves, or in critically negotiating mediated representations of the past for their relations to collective identities and experiences. In making this point, we don’t mean to suggest that media consumption is always and everywhere characterized by a critical response to forms of historical representation. If one of the preconditions of nostalgia is dissatisfaction with the present, this illuminates one of the ways in which non-critical media representations of the past are legitimated, or at least allowed to pass by uncontested. The rise of the mass media throughout modernity has changed the face of public knowledge. In the contemporary period, negative news and alarmist issues are disseminated with increasing speed and scope within a culture of risk (Beck, 1999). The message may consist of yet another poll showing a further loss of public confidence in the integrity and credibility of politicians, yet another report of a further wave of super-bugs such as MRSA set to devastate the civilian population, or yet another account of a further rise in criminal violence and harm to those who are socially most vulnerable, such as children and the elderly. Contemporary media provide abundant sources of knowledge about what people should worry about. Uncertainty and insecurity in present circumstances create fertile ground for a sentimental longing for the past, or for a past fondly reconstructed out of selectively idealized features, and again the media help to fill this ground even as, in other dimensions of their output, they serve to undermine it. A representational cycle of negative present and positive past promotes meanings made by means of opposition, contradistinction and dichotomous contrast, rather than in terms of the more ambiguous, unsettled and contested relations between past and present. The former deny the past its transactional role in the present, while the latter serve to open it up and allow it to be interrogated. Our point is that historical meaning is popularly constructed and understood in both ways, at different times and in different contexts, rather than just one or the other being the mode in which nostalgic assessments of social and cultural change are made. 925 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 Historical Assessments The distinction we have made is often mapped on to academic historical practice. In How Societies Remember, Connerton (1989: 13) suggests that a key aspect of historical work is its inferentiality. Through cross-questioning the evidence available to them, historians can extract ‘information which it does not explicitly contain or even which is contrary to the overt assertions contained in it’. They are ‘able to reject something explicitly told them in their evidence and to substitute their own interpretation of events in its place’. Through such critical practice, historians can remain relatively independent from the bias of social memory in order to achieve the most objective accounts of the past possible. What they may infer from the historical evidence is then set in direct contrast with an affectively appealing nostalgic relationship to the past and as such provides a set of benchmarks for distinguishing between different articulations of the past and different forms of historical representation. So, for instance, the metonymic shortcut in popular iconography that can immediately evoke a period and facilitate a nostalgic response (Marilyn Monroe holding down her pleated skirt over an air vent, or Winston Churchill with his trademark fat cigar, are two examples from the 1950s) can be compared with the systematic reconstruction of a period, event or biography that involves an awareness of the remaking of historical meaning and an attempt to generate new historical knowledge, new combinations of such knowledge or new interpretations of whatever knowledge is already scholarly available. This is a fairly conventional way of distinguishing between critical historical practice and a sensual, nostalgic longing for the past, but we should be careful not to polarize the two in a fixed scaling of orientations to the past and to historical knowledge. It is not as if the historian is immune to social memory or the force of iconic images, nor is it the case that social memory or symbolic figuration consist entirely of nostalgic appeals to the past. More importantly, nostalgia is not confined to trivialized mass representations, or sentimentalized expressions of regret and yearning for times past, as these may be found in historical tourism or advertising culture. This point is central to our argument. Nostalgia is more complex than that, and covers a range of ways of orienting to and engaging with the past. Polarizing historical objectivity and nostalgia in memory work as if they are respectively the cardinal virtue and sin of historiography is to underwrite simplistic versions of the concept of nostalgia, and provide a dubious means for maintaining the legitimacy of history as an academic practice. Conventionally, this has produced a hierarchical ranking of accounts in terms of trustworthiness, authenticity and authority, with professional history at the apex and nostalgia at the 926 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia base, regardless of whether this involves media historical representations or vernacular forms of social remembering. These distinctions have been called into question, and so should perhaps be reconceived as a continuum, ‘with history at one end, nostalgia at the other and memory as a bridge or transition between them’ (Cook, 2005: 3). This seems appropriate because, as a criterion of historiographical value, objectivity has been subject to extensive criticism. What seems more workable than any strict notion of objectivity is the degree of critical questioning that is operative in any transactional engagement with the past and with time’s traces as these have been searched out and gathered together as part of the practice of historical reconstruction. This provides us with a more satisfactory means of assessing the intellectual scope of either academic or media history, and the extent to which it encourages reflexive connections of past and present (see e.g. Nora, 1996). When that scope is narrow or when, say, past and present are conceived in terms of deterministic causal relations, historical representation can be said to provide little alternative to banal forms of nostalgic longing. We deliberately mention academic and media history alongside each other because, for a variety of reasons, they are often counterposed. The prejudices involved in this would repay critical attention in their own right, but here we want to suggest that it is more fruitful to operate with a broader notion of what it means to engage with the past in a productive and imaginative manner. Although not claiming that they are necessarily or invariably absent in mass-mediated treatments of the past, Baer (2001: 492) suggests that ‘critical reflection and response’ are characteristic of a significant relationship with the past. Engaging with the past becomes significant when it involves seeing past and present as dialectically related and refusing the temptation to collapse them into each other. This is where Jameson’s take on the concept of historicity is relevant, for he claims that this allows a ‘perception of the present as history; that is a relationship to the present which defamiliarises it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterised as a historical perspective’ (Jameson, 1991: 284). Historical engagement is thus about far more than the writing of academic history. It is a way of engaging with the past through which the present can be seen in the interrelated contexts of past, present and future. It is contingent and fluid, open to scrutiny, contestation and change but ultimately dependent on the maintenance of a distance and distinction between past and present. The importance of history outside the academy is acknowledged in what has become known as the heritage debate (see e.g. Samuel, 1994; Lowenthal, 1997), but the critics involved tend at times to rely implicitly on the hierarchical ranking of history, memory and nostalgia and so fail to get properly to grips with the complex set of processes involved in 927 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 publicly representing, consuming and understanding the past (see e.g. Hewison, 1987). The distinctions made in criticism of the ‘heritage industry’ between nostalgia and history or nostalgia and authentic memory are nowhere fully investigated or conceptualized, so making it unclear how to differentiate between positive and negative representations of the past. Raphael Samuel’s (1994: 259) critique of what he terms ‘heritage baiting’ targeted a critical underestimation of, and lack of imaginative sympathy with, the way in which ‘heritage industry’ and its diverse practices have democratized the past, or at least facilitated progress towards this goal, even where this has appealed to nostalgic sentiment. Although this is not to claim that Samuel provides a comprehensive account of the distinction between reductive and democratic uses of the past, he does make the problems of nostalgia as a conceptual tool evident through a contrast between popular negotiations of the past and the intellectual presuppositions of the heritage critics. Despite a tendency on his part towards cultural populism over critical engagement, Samuel’s examination of the proliferation of local museums and the amateur historian, archivist and oral history projects, serves to contest the claim of left-wing critics that heritage is ideology through and through, and as such inherently serves the interests of a bourgeois agenda which diminishes or glosses over the democratizing power of popular historical practices. Samuel’s contention that the widening of popular participation and grassroots activity has opened up a plurality of interpretations, memories and narratives of the past that were previously neglected or suppressed in deference to dominant historical accounts, suggests that heritage critics and postmodernists alike are totalizing in their commentary of late modern interactions with the past. Behind their backs, nostalgia has arisen to serve or stand in for a critical and subversive potential where other resources seem lacking. Assessing this always remains difficult, but it is nevertheless part of a continuum with history and not utterly divorced from it. This is why nostalgia is sometimes used as a critical tool in assessing academic as well as popular history, because infusing our historical work with some avowed preference, if not nostalgic longing, for a previous mode of representing or engaging with the past, remains an abiding temptation. Over 30 years ago, Leonore Davidoff warned fellow historians of women’s history against catching historical heroines ‘in the amber of a new feminist hagiology’, while more recently, in writing on feminist fiction and social remembering, Gayle Green has been accused of falling prey to nostalgic bias in seeking to revive a former age of active feminist memory (Davidoff, 1974; Green, 1991; Tannock, 1995). Stuart Tannock suggests that the only way to circumvent this trap is to acknowledge the existence of multiple nostalgias – some productive and socially useful and 928 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia others less so. This is exactly our point. Nostalgia is not all of a piece. It is subject to circumstance, motivation and interests, and over both time and space, to degree, variation and change. It may seem that this entails conceiving of nostalgia in such a broad way that the concept is in danger of losing any critical edge it may have had. In our view the opposite is the case. It is not so much its lack of specificity that is the problem as the tendency to see it in a singular and deterministic way. The problem is in not accepting and keeping in play its multiple senses and manifestations. For example, it is sometimes assumed that in applying the term to an audience’s ways of thinking and relating to the past, it can likewise be applied to cultural texts, as if particular texts are inevitably tied to specific responses. Polysemy is played down and causal relationships inferred. Fred Davis (1979) can be cited as using nostalgia interchangeably to refer to both the characteristics of media and other cultural artefacts, and the temporal orientation and consumption practices of media audiences. This conflates the workings of the media’s relationship to the past and specific practices of media consumption. Postmodernist conceptions of nostalgia also fall prey to an assumed relationship between audience and text, suggesting that the reduction of meaning via processes of media representation in passively accepted by the audience, resulting in loss of meaning at the site of reception. An investigation of the ways in which audiences may actively engage in the cultural making of meaning is not considered. We need to investigate the interaction between different sites of meaning-making if we are to move nostalgia away from a nebulous characterization of a particular orientation to the past, and engage instead with the distinct and specific ways in which contemporary interaction with the past is enacted. Media Assessments Davis’s conception of the media production of nostalgia is centrally concerned with the self-referential nature that mediated nostalgic remembering involves. Rather than remembering experiences, we are more likely to remember mediated experiences and as such, mediation of the past is a process by which the media can fix and limit social memory (Davis, 1979: 130). Lynn Spigel (1995) highlights this in her study of the increasing recycling of old television sit-coms. She suggests that the commercial motivation and practices of their syndication have profound effects on the narratives of the past available to people in the present and therefore on their historically situated understanding of their own situation. Despite problems arising from the implied division between her students’ media-informed temporal knowledge and her own, which is experientially informed, politically inflected yet apparently unmediated, Spigel 929 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 highlights the key role of television reruns in women’s sense of the past and their notions of the 1950s as compared to the present. This supports our case for analysing the ways in which uses of the past in contemporary media contribute to a historical imagination. It is clearly important to address an environment where the past is sensuously rather than critically evoked, where the meanings available are juxtaposed and jumbled rather than represented in an integrally cumulative way and instantly to hand rather than represented through a process which itself exists through time. In refusing the notion of an amnesiac culture where the media treatment of the past is of no consequence as it has no historical meaning, the effects of processes of mediation need to be made central to an examination of the media construction of the past. This involves keeping the different senses and modalities of nostalgia in view of each other, but the difficulty of this is exaggerated by lack of attention to how it is diversely articulated. Where nostalgia primarily entails a relation between the modern human subject and the past as this is temporally mediated by cultural texts, there is surprisingly little attempt to discuss the modes of representation and operation involved in the communication of nostalgia. To return to Davis, the media are simply assumed by him to use particular modes of representation that will ‘touch nostalgic “chords” in the audience’ (Davis, 1979: 82). We may grant that nostalgia is a way of thinking and feeling rather than being directly produced or constituted by consuming nostalgic media texts, but there are nevertheless cultural artefacts that facilitate nostalgia as a way of feeling and thinking. Although Davis’s analysis identifies a new way in which we relate to time and the past in late modernity, he is vague about the specific ways in which this operates. He fails to explain how the media elicit nostalgic responses, assuming that what is really at issue are the pre-existing psychological structures associated with such responses. Davis also fails to engage with the mechanics of representing the past in a nostalgic way, so the question of ‘what constitutes a nostalgic media text?’ goes unanswered. Davis provides just one example. The general literature on nostalgia offers little in accounting for why the media represent the past in particular ways, and this can leave the stage open for reductionist accounts. Where the negative sense of nostalgia prevails, there is a tendency to neglect the reciprocal relationship between audience and media in generating the conditions for making sense and meaning. When used as a critical tool, nostalgia easily obscures these complex relations in the meaning-making process, being presented instead as a unified concept that claims to encompass the role of audience and text. Conceptually, the term then lacks analytical purchase on the relationship between media audiences and the production of texts and cannot adequately grapple with the ways in which either media texts or media consumers are oriented to 930 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia the past. Davis does at least attempt to develop a sociology of nostalgia that suggests that nostalgia itself is socially useful, helping cultures adapt to rapid change, as well as hampering a more developed historical understanding. Nostalgia is thus charged with limiting social memory yet being necessary to it. This is helpful, at least in initiating acknowledgement of productive or contestatory applications of nostalgia. To the extent that nostalgia characteristic of western modernity testifies to ‘the destabilisation of everyday life’, Patrick Wright has pointed to its ‘critical and subversive potential’ as well as its more obvious conservative or reactionary forms. This would for instance include ‘articulations of cultural particularity’ in everyday historical consciousness that are not represented in mainstream or dominant versions of the ‘national past’. Such consciousness has its jingoistic expressions, but can also testify to ‘radical needs which – finding neither realisation in present everyday life nor recognition in the complacent grandeur of official symbolism – may still be reaching out to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”’, as Walter Benjamin famously put it (Wright, 1985: 26). This helps us keep in view the politics of memory and representation. What Davis doesn’t acknowledge is that delimiting memory may result in an inability to contest dominant nationalistic accounts of the past by referring to and drawing on the situated experience of particular groups or generations, whereas what Wright does acknowledge, in his rewarding assessment of historical experience for those ‘living in an old country’, is that issues of order and power cannot be divorced from ways of relating to the past in either social memory or historical reconstruction. More recent approaches to nostalgia in memory studies display rather different shortcomings. Too often they suffer from a simplistic approach to the media. Hoskins’s (2001) assumption that the media operate in a similar way to individual or collective memory proves problematic as he suggests that traumatic, negative or difficult memories are ‘repressed’. Quite how ‘repression’ fits conceptually with the selective presentation, reproduction and discarding of particular images of past or present because of media assumptions about audiences and consumer tastes or media values concerning cultural styles and fashions is left unexplored, while the emphasis on ‘repression’ denies the role of the media in actively forging memory across a social formation. In a more recent article, Hoskins (2004) continues to overlook the plurality of audiences and differences between social, collective memory and media representations of the past, as if coordinated, unified media generate homogeneous narratives that circulate uncontested. Postmodernist theorists also simplify the role of the media in representing the past, suggesting that decisions over representation are dictated (rather than influenced) by what has previously been used to represent an event or period. This is an ahistorical view of 931 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 media representation since any sample of it is not made once-and-for-all and simply recycled. If this were the case, historical meaning would rapidly become totally derelict rather than being managed or limited by representational practices. Postmodernist accounts effectively remove agency or intent from representational practices. It is as if their association with a supposedly redundant humanism irredeemably damns these terms. In attempting to develop a more sophisticated conceptual understanding of nostalgia, at the very least we need to accept Paul Grainge’s (2002) differentiation between nostalgia as a structure of feeling or affective and experiential discourse and nostalgia as a commodified style or commodified set of practices. He describes the former as the nostalgia mood and the latter, the nostalgia mode. His notion of the nostalgia mode is reliant on postmodernist notions of the contemporary representational environment. The claim that we inhabit a media landscape characterized by hyper-reality, pastiche and repetition provides a useful perspective on how the media represent the past from a restricted pool of textual representations, thus highlighting the process by which media representation of the past is often dependent on the use of an iconographic form of communication. The coexistence of this with a nostalgia mood stops short of the postmodern curtailment of audience agency, suggesting that modes of representation are inextricably linked to meaning-making processes but have the potential to limit rather than determine their outcome. This more cautious and balanced account is helpful, but Grainge’s appropriation of features of the postmodernist account of the contemporary media is not unproblematic. In discussing nostalgia as a cultural style, he inherits some of the difficulties of postmodernist claims of declining referentiality where ‘increasingly sophisticated media appropriate images from a diversity of social and historical contexts’, so generating a ‘recombinant culture’ where media texts are consumed on the basis of surface appearances, leading to a complete loss of meaning (Harms and Dickens, 1996: 211). Although not claiming a complete loss of meaning, Grainge asserts that, as an aesthetic style of memory, monochrome representation defers a text’s content to its evocation of a generalized feeling of pastness (Grainge, 2002: 59) This fails to explain why particular images or texts are regularly used as symbolically representative of a period, denies that this has any consequences for historical meaning aside from generating an impalpable sense of the quality of being past, and ignores questions of order and power raised in the systematic manipulation of the way the past is represented. In his reliance on these assumptions, Grainge’s notion of a nostalgia mode cannot move beyond the circulation of images themselves in order to explore their repercussions for social understandings of the past. Although the differentiation between the affective nostalgia mood and 932 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia the nostalgia mode as a commodified style or practice is a useful one, there are at least potential difficulties with the distinction when the notion of mode is conceptually based on the notion of form overriding content as a site of textual meaning. Grainge concurs with Ien Ang’s (1996) rejection of totalizing postmodernist claims that cultural amnesia is a fait accompli and so suggests a potential association between memory and the nostalgia mood. He criticizes postmodernism, as we have, for failing to recognize the agency of the audience by reducing them to an unthinking collectivity who passively absorb the meanings communicated to them via the media, thus denying them a role in meaning-making processes. He goes on to claim that meaningful historical narratives can continue to be produced ‘through the recycling and/or hybridisation of past styles’ (Grainge, 2002: 6). The suggestion that meaningful narratives can be made from texts where the referent is semantically secondary to its stylistic attributes elides the critical distinction between mediated and broader forms of social remembering. The importance of aesthetic style cannot be ignored as it is central to the potential temporal meanings of a text, but to systematically foreground this overreferentiality as a locus of meaning necessarily implies that a capacity to generate meaningful historical narratives has been seriously compromised. Grainge is right to suggest that among the multiples senses and applications of contemporary nostalgia are those which are not only associated with feelings of loss for some aspect or time of the past, but also those associated with retro markers of taste or style in the present. The problem is that these tend to blur into each other as Grainge gets his moods mixed up with his modes and runs together consumption practices, lived experience and diverse public treatments of the past. Whose historicity is waning here? Conclusion Over the course of the past century, nostalgia has become the bête noire of cultural critics, sociologists and historians. We fully acknowledge that nostalgia can delimit or diminish everyday historical consciousness as well as undermining the credentials of historical narrative. It can certainly operate ideologically or carry convenient ideological meanings, as for instance when it acts as a sop to the ravages of progress. Renato Rosaldo has written of imperialist nostalgia in this respect as ‘mourning for what one has destroyed’, so that ‘putatively savage societies become a stable reference point for defining (the felicitous progress of) civilised identity’. He adds: ‘ “We” (who believe in progress) valorise innovation, and then yearn for more stable worlds, whether these reside in our own past, in other cultures, or in the conflation of the two’ (Rosaldo, 1993: 69). We endorse this point of criticism, and at the same time regard it as 933 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 supporting our argument that the meanings of nostalgia are multiple because culturally and historically specific. Nostalgia is neither an absolute nor singularly universal phenomenon. Jo Tacchi (2003) illustrates this point in citing Serematakis’s (1994) explication of the difference between the American notion of nostalgia, which is characterized as trivializing romantic sentimentality, and the Greek notion of nostalgia, which is understood as desire or longing with a burning pain to journey (Tacchi, 2003: 287–8). Tacchi suggests that these varying interpretations have different semantic consequences, where the American understanding forecloses the possibility of the past having any transformative role in the present while the Greek conception evokes a range of bodily experiences to negotiate the past and as such allows the past a transactional role in the present. The continued unqualified use of a term laden with culturally specific meanings prevents a far-reaching and transferable analysis of the mediation of the past. We have seen how ‘heritage-baiting’ has relied on a hierarchical set of historiographical distinctions. Our objection to this conceptual reliance is not made in denial of the fact that constructions of national heritage are commercially exploited, all the way from Disney’s Mainstreet USA to retro fashion stylings, or of the ways in which, over the past 25 years, heritage has been used ideologically in yoking imagined continuities to ruthless neoconservative drives for economic change (see Corner and Harvey, 1991). Our criticism is directed against the relentless use of nostalgia as history’s negativized Other. ‘Baiting’ may be the best term when it relies on simplistic notions of capitalist manipulation, but obviously does not apply tout court to the cultural critique of uses of the past in more general terms. That is why we have found Patrick Wright’s analysis of heritage sources of social nostalgia a much more compelling account than that offered by Hewison, among others, for what he seeks to explain is their popular appeal, in all their complexities and contradictions (see McGuigan, 1996: 116–34). There remains, nonetheless, a constant tendency to slide inexorably towards either cultural elitism or cultural populism in critical assessments of nostalgia. In both cases an idealization is involved. This tendency has a longer history than the ‘heritage debate’ itself. It has been operative over the past century in the development of anthropology, sociology and critical theory. When the idealized past of premodern societies has been used sociologically in contrast to modern societies, what has often been invoked is a mythical stability, unity and ontological security, so drawing on some variant or other of Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft polarity, or any of the other temporal dichotomies we mentioned at the outset. Either implicitly or explicitly, nostalgia has also been characteristic of elite criticisms of mass culture where, again, a stark before/after historical scenario posits 934 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia premodern art as having ‘an organic relationship to the community expressing ritualistically its natural forms of production and social relationships’ (Stauth and Turner, 1988: 510). The folk society paradigm in anthropology and folk life studies relied on exactly such an assumed organicism and in some cases supported an anti-modern reaction to socalled mass culture in ways closely allied to Rosaldo’s ‘imperialist nostalgia’ (Pickering and Green, 1987). Georg Stauth and Bryan Turner have shown how nostalgia paradigmatically informed the development of German social theory from Marx to the Frankfurt School, and especially the cultural critique of Theodor Adorno. To the extent that critical theory and mass culture criticism relied on the dichotomy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, they were both elitist and nostalgic, ‘looking backward towards a period in history when there was a greater integration between life and art, feeling and thought’ (Stauth and Turner, 1988: 518). Postmodernist theory has involved the critical deconstruction of this dichotomy to the extent that it is now unsustainable as the ground of aesthetic evaluation, whether of popular culture or art music and the fine arts, none of which in any case are unaffected by the cultural industries. Whether an egalitarian potential resides in cultural commodities and modern forms of consumerism, since they are in principle open to all, remains debatable, but it is certainly the case that ‘mass’ cultural critique is now constantly beset with having to avoid an elitist disdain and nostalgic withdrawal, seeing contemporary culture only through the distant lens of melancholia. Some form of nostalgic pathos underpins many of the critical objections that have been levelled against new media, whether of the early 20th or early 21st centuries. As these examples show, nostalgia has never been the preserve of the ‘masses’ or the ‘cultural industries’. Nor can it be reduced to a final or unitary definition, since its meanings and modalities are culturally and historically variegated. It certainly cannot be confined to the Disneyfication of the past or to selective postmodernist pastiche, as in such nostalgia films as American Graffiti. Nostalgia is an easy commercial ploy, whether it’s rock ’n’ roll, Christmas cards or TV programmes about the Second World War that are being marketed. And no one is fully immune. Even momentarily, we are all prey to nostalgia, particularly where a vehicle of personal memory, such as a photograph of a dead parent or lost lover, may touch us emotionally. Certain media of communication and certain art forms may reach us more directly in this respect than others. Since it can carry a powerful affective or sensuous charge, music can act as the catalyst of moving surges of memory. By extension, music also has a widespread association with an idealized lost past, and is claimed to be ‘able to conjure forth the lost qualities and goods associated with it’ (Flinn, 1992: 89). Indeed, in cinematography it is music that 935 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 has repeatedly borne the burden of nostalgia, functioning ‘as a sort of conduit to connect listeners – and commentators – to an idealised past, offering them the promise of a retrieval of lost utopian coherence’ (Flinn, 1992: 50). This utopian element can thus be present in many ‘mass’ cultural commodities, and not just in the reified ideals that the categories of ‘folk’ or ‘art’ music have been made to carry. It is clear enough in the composition of commercial film music, particularly that associated with film noir and melodrama. Carol Flinn has suggested that the investment of classical Hollywood film scores in 19th-century romanticism was part of ‘a wider ideological nostalgia of the time’ that ‘seemed to provide an escape from then current deficiencies, both real and perceived’, as well as ‘a source of restored plenitude and unity’. The historical irony in this is that for late 19th-century romanticism, the model for integrity and strength was found in Hellenic culture: ‘Like Hollywood’s interest in romanticism, romanticism’s own interest in Hellenic totality can be understood in terms of a desire to exceed contemporary experience, to get beyond the sense of social, economic, and subjective fragmentation or impotence’ (Flinn, 1992: 49–50). It is not only irony that is at play in nostalgic enterprises and experiences. Central to our argument has been that nostalgia can only be properly conceptualized as a contradictory phenomenon, being driven by utopian impulses – the desire for re-enchantment – as well as melancholic responses to disenchantment. It is far too simplistic to call it ‘a flight from the present’, as the philosopher Harry Moody described it (Moody, 1984: 161). Instead, it can be both negatively and positively charged, and so ‘can be conceptualised as conveying a knowing and reflexive relationship with the past, as a yearning for a better but irretrievable past, or, in more sceptical accounts, as emblematic of an engrossing but ultimately fabricated approximation of the past’ (Drake, 2003: 190). Tony Blair’s accusation that ‘countries wrapped in nostalgia cannot build a strong future’ glosses only its negative dimension (Sunday Times, 5 April 1998). Nostalgia in popular culture doesn’t necessarily operate with the dichotomous before/after scenario we have seen associated with classical sociology and critical theory. More commonly, it is manifest in an ambiguous relation to the past and present, as for instance in the music of migrants, where a sense of loss associated with the past coexists with a sense of longing associated with the future. ‘Migrant music epitomises dream and nostalgia combined’, one example being Portuguese fado and its expression of ‘a sorrow that was almost hope’ (Connell and Gibson, 2003: 161–2). Analytically, as we have been arguing, the term cannot be set off against ‘strong’ history (or a ‘strong future’) but must be reconceived in its intimate connections to both historical practice and diverse forms of social remembering, for ‘where history suppresses the element of disavowal or 936 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia fantasy in its re-presentation of the past, nostalgia foregrounds those elements, and in effect lays bare the processes at the heart of remembrance’. This may produce ‘knowledge and insight, even though these may be of a different order from those produced by conventional historical analysis, and may be experienced in different ways’ (Cook, 2005: 4). In this suitably nuanced estimation, rethinking nostalgia ‘may involve a redrafting of the techniques and conventions of historical analysis to take on board the dialectic between memory and history, holding together objective analysis and subjective response in a productive tension’ (Cook, 2005: 17). This is close to our own position, which seeks a rapprochement of history and memory and the fields of study associated with them. We have suggested that rethinking nostalgia offers one way of taking on this task, since it means overcoming the opposition between history and memory just as much as it entails refusing to set off melancholia and utopia against each other, as if they are locked in a duel to the death. If the future doesn’t come into being through forgetting, through denying or dismissing the past, especially when the present is judged to be in some way deficient, the imperative concern is then with forwardlooking uses of the past, of the past as a set of resources for the future. These have always to be critically negotiated and drawn upon, whatever history is in the frame, but the equally critical identification is with what has been passively or actively set aside and neglected in the present. For example, the demands of certain subaltern groups for social justice and a fairer future are fostered, at least in part, ‘by vigilantly returning to the past, reinvestigating the past over and over again in order to find places and moments of resistance to oppression that might open up a better future’ (Oliver, 2001: 135). For many such groups, the past has long been a locus of possibility and source of aspiration, of providing a way of imagining ‘present impossibilities becoming possible in the future’, for ‘the future opens into otherness only insofar as the past does too’ (Oliver, 2001: 136; see also Pickering, 1987 for one example utilizing popular song in this way). When this reciprocal movement is operative, nostalgia becomes an action rather than an attitude, showing how the politics of nostalgia are realized in its applications rather than being inherent in the affective phenomenon itself. Nostalgia arises because of the divergence of experience and expectation generated by modernity, but as we have argued throughout, it is not a singular or fixed condition (Koselleck, 1985; Pickering, 2004). It is not to be conceived as necessarily ‘the opposite of utopia, but, as a form of memory, always implicated, even productive in it’, for, as Huyssen reminds us, ‘it is the ideology of modernisation itself that has given nostalgia its bad name, and we do not need to abide by that judgement’ (Huyssen, 1995: 88). Nostalgia as retreat from the present and nostalgia 937 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 as retrieval for the future are not mutually exclusive, any more than either impulse is the preserve of dominant or subordinate groups. Retreat and retrieval are elements in ‘every nostalgic vision’, and this ambivalence ‘is worth keeping in mind when considering the many ways in which nostalgia has been institutionalised in Western societies’ (Tannock, 1995: 459). The ability of nostalgia as a concept to historically locate relationships with the past means that it is an invaluable tool in investigating the way in which the media and other cultural institutions construct the past according to the imperatives of modernity and late modernity, not as a static, isolated system of representation but as part of a wider temporal orientation whose characteristics are historically grounded and subject to change over time. Nostalgia is a term that enables the relationship between past and present to be conceived of as fragile and corruptible, inherently dependent on how the resources of the past are made available, how those traces of what has been are mediated and circulated, and how they are employed and deployed in the development of a relationship between past and present. The acknowledgement of what is involved in creating and sustaining a relationship between past and present makes it possible for us to conceptualize nostalgia as a critical tool and distinguish between positive, productive, active uses of the past and those which are sterile, impotent, non-transactional. The critical use of nostalgia has been centrally concerned with the emergence of a new way of relating to the past in modernity that has generally, for various reasons, been considered regressive. We hope to have shown that it can just as feasibly be considered as progressive. Notes 1. For a wide-ranging survey of the different academic contributions to this field, see Olick and Robbins (1998). 2. See Smith (1998) for an overview of late modern temporality in connection with nostalgia and Appadurai (1990) for a more general account of contemporary relations of time, space and culture. References Ang, I. (1996) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. London: Routledge. Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Public Culture 2(2): 1–24. Baer, A. (2001) ‘Consuming History and Memory Through Mass Media Products’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 4(4): 491–501. Baudrillard, J. (1994) The Illusion of the End. Malden, MA and Cambridge: Polity Press. 938 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia Beck, U. (1999) World Risk Society. Malden, MA and Cambridge: Polity Press. Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Chaney, D. (2002) Cultural Change and Everyday Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Connell, J. and Gibson, C. (2003) Soundtracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London and New York: Routledge. Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Cook, P. (2005) Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (eds) (1991) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. London: Routledge. Davidoff, L. (1974) ‘Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England’, Journal of Social History 7(4): 406–48. Davis, F. (1977) ‘Nostalgia, Identity and the Current Nostalgia Wave’, Journal of Popular Culture 11: 414–24. Davis, F. (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York and London: The Free Press. Doane, J. and Hodges, D. (1987) Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism. London: Methuen. Drake, P. (2003) ‘ “Mortgaged to Music”: New Retro Movies in 1990s Hollywood Cinema’, in P. Grainge (ed.) Memory and Popular Film. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Flinn, C. (1992) Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gitlin, T. (1980) The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Grainge, P. (2002) Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America. Westport, CT: Praeger. Green, G. (1991) ‘Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory’, Signs 16(2): 290–321. Harms, J. B. and Dickens, D. R. (1996) ‘Postmodern Media Studies: Analysis or Symptom?’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13(2): 210–27. Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Hoskins, A. (2001) ‘New Memory: Mediating History’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21(4): 333–46. Hoskins, A. (2004) ‘Television and the Collapse of Memory’, Time and Society 13(10): 109–27. Hutcheon, L. (1989) The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge. Huyssen, A. (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York and London: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Koselleck, R. (1985) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Le Goff, J. (1992) History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press. 939 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Current Sociology Vol. 54 No. 6 Lowenthal, D. (1989) ‘Nostalgia Tells it Like it Wasn’t’, in C. Shaw and M. Chase (eds) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Lowenthal, D. (1997) The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. London: Viking. McGuigan, J. (1996) Culture and the Public Sphere. London: Routledge. Moody, H. (1984) ‘Reminiscence and the Recovery of the Public World’, in M. Kaminsky (ed.) The Uses of Reminiscence. New York: Haworth Press. Nora, P. (1996) Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. Olick, J. K. and Robbins, J. (1998) ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–40. Oliver, K. (2001) Witnessing. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Pickering, M. (1987) ‘The Past as a Source of Aspiration’, in M. Pickering and T. Green (eds) Everyday Culture. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Pickering, M. (2004) ‘Experience as Horizon: Koselleck, Expectation and Historical Time’, Cultural Studies 18(2/3): 271–89. Pickering, M. and Green, T. (eds) (1987) Everyday Culture. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Rosaldo, R. (1993) Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. London: Routledge. Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory. London: Verso. Serematakis, C. N. (1994) ‘The Memory of the Senses, Part One: Marks of the Transitory’, in C. N. Serematakis (ed.) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. London: University of Chicago Press. Smith, J. S. (1998) ‘The Strange History of the Decade: Modernity, Nostalgia and the Perils of Periodisation’, Journal of Social History 32(2): 263–85. Spigel, L. (1995) ‘From the Dark Ages to the Golden Age: Women’s Memories and Television Reruns’, Screen 36(1): 16–33. Stauth, G. and Turner, B. S. (1988) ‘Nostalgia, Postmodernism and the Critique of Mass Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society 5(2–3): 509–26. Tacchi, J. (2003) ‘Nostalgia and Radio Sound’, in M. Bull and L. Back (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. Tannock, S. (1995) ‘Nostalgia Critique’, Cultural Studies 9(3): 453–64. Wright, P. (1985) On Living in an Old Country. London: Verso. Biographical Note: Michael Pickering is reader in culture and communications in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. He has published in the areas of cultural studies and social history as well as media analysis and theory. His books include Everyday Culture (1987, with T. Green); History, Experience and Cultural Studies (1997); Researching Communications (1999); Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (2001); Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value (2004, with Keith Negus) and Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour 940 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia (2005, with Sharon Lockyer). He is currently writing a book on blackface minstrelsy in Britain. Address: Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK. [email: [email protected]] Biographical Note: Emily Keightley gained her undergraduate degree in media and communication studies and her masters degree in media and cultural analysis at Loughborough University. She is currently in her third year of doctoral study, researching in the area of media and memory in modernity. Her work is concerned particularly with women’s uses of the past and with how women draw on both vernacular and media forms of social remembering and historical reconstruction. She has previously written an article on photography and phonography as technologies of memory, which has appeared in the European Journal of Cultural Studies (Vol. 9[2], 2006). Address: Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK. [email: [email protected]] 941 Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on February 19, 2013