Using nostalgia for good

Back in July I wrote a post here called The futility of constructing a better past & the necessity of imagining a better future, the essence of which was a rant against (what seems to be) an increasing wallowing in nostalgia, and how I didn’t much like it:

And this ties in with much I’ve written on the subject over the past few years, from Deep England to various pieces about why we are forced by (Mark Fisher’s concept of) capitalist realism to hide in nostalgia because imagining a better (non-neoliberal) world is rendered seemingly-impossible by that concept.

Some time after posting that I came across the article Imagining the good life in Stoke-on-Trent: Connecting memories, nostalgia and utopia and the abstract intrigued me:

In the context of environmental, social and economic crises, Levitas urges sociologists to engage with imagined futures and desires for better ways of living. At a local level, facilitating collective visions of desired futures is a vital component of democratic sustainable regeneration. Imagining positive future visions is often challenging, however, for residents of post-industrial cities where good work and future prospects are lacking, infrastructure has declined, and once close-knit communities are increasingly divided. This article explores how emergent narratives of a future good life may be pieced together from nostalgic discussions of the past and critiques of the present. While there is a resurgence of literature considering how forms of nostalgia shape perceptions of the present, reconceptualising it as potentially positive and future-facing, there has been little empirical exploration of how nostalgia might inform utopian imagination of a future good life in post-industrial settings. Drawing on focus groups with white residents of Stoke-on-Trent we show how the past, and conditions of the present, shaped imagined futures in three ways: invoking a nostalgic longing for recreation of an idealised industrial past; rejecting the past to create an entirely different future; and critically engaging with the past to identify valued elements of a better future. We suggest that facilitating discussion of present and past local life can provide the basis for engaging residents in constructing collective, historically grounded utopian visions for their city, a crucial step in moves towards a future which might enable living well within environmental limits.

Drawing on the work of Ruth Levitas they’re using nostalgia, not as a backwards-facing surrender to the status quo, but rather as a way to bypass capitalist realism’s trap and let people imagine a future good life in post-industrial settings - and to me a future good life comes after the end of capitalism.

Which struck a chord with me because basically that’s what I’m doing with my Acid Renaissance series of artwork. Strictly speaking I’m using the mythic past rather than a remembered past (but it’s very easy to argue that any nostalgic vision of the past is at least semi-mythic anyway) - As I noted elsewhere I’m using elements of myth, folklore, and fantasy to take a somewhat metaphorical approach to re-imagining the future.

I have made sure that I’m left a few clues in my artwork that I’m imagining a future rather than simply illustrating a mythic past: the wind turbines in Bacchanalia beneath the Wind Turbines (also pictured at the top of this past), a glimpse of a laptop and a modern wheelchair (model’s own) in The Oracle, and so on. Maybe I should have made this part of the work more obvious?