I don't know anything about recent criticism. I learned thru my own
development how unproductive, and how dangerous, nostalgia can be.
The problem with nostalgia is its discounting of the present in favor of a
golden age that never existed. The assumed superior past is what makes
nostalgia politically suspect.
Yearning, which doesn't assume that its object used to be there but went
missing, is a whole other matter.
Nostalgia which, like the pastoral, takes the form of idealizing the lives
of the most miserable is particularly noxious.
The joker in the supposed chinese saying about the happy man who lived in
boring times is that there never was a boring time. Which doesn't mean that
all periods are equally miserable for all people. Call it punctuated misery.
Mark
>At 03:18 PM 11/21/2003 +1100, Chris Jones wrote:
>On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 09:12, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
> > But the more serious issues of the pastoral
> > do continue to preoccupy some modern and contemporary poets,
>
>
>One of the elements of pastoral forgotten, eclipsed, elided, is
>nostalgia. Repeated in recent criticism as if it were a crime, a guilt
>of which the pastoral would also be too quickly judged as guilty is the
>badness of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a bad thing, so we are told. Marx is
>criticised for his nostalgia which is beyond redemption, for example.
>Nostalgia is bad we are again told by the selected hermeneutic masters
>and they would say it, wouldn't they? Of course nostalgia is bad. It is
>bad that we wish for a safe home, a homesick melancholia which we will
>forever lack within the limited bourgeois horizon of capitalist
>ideology. Nostalgia is bad if we yearn for a safe home free from hostile
>attack. In the dying age of imperialist wars not even the imperial home
>is safe. It is bad that we are nostalgic for a nature being wantonly
>destroyed with clear felling of native forests for woodchip and
>expanding markets. It is bad that we are nostalgic for a world that
>could have been when many animal and plant species become extinct and
>that is becoming less and less safe for human habitation while being
>told to follow a marketing logic of suicide by selected hermeneuts
>acting as glorified public relations officials.
>
>The pastoral can look to a landscape no longer sliced up, divided and
>threatened with suicidal destruction with nostalgia. We can still speak
>and hope for a nostalgia of pleasure. To stick with Marx and take up
>Derrida's celebration of the messianic in Marx and to celebrate the
>nostalgia of Marx. A nostalgia of pleasure which marks with the "of" a
>separation from pleasure as an essential force of life. Pleasure is an
>emotion which makes life. Nostalgia becomes a struggle for the forces of
>life and we can join Marx with his nostalgia in joyous laughter as
>Derrida joins Marx and laughs with messianic joy.
>
>If it is not too obscure, can Jean Genet have said all that needs to be
>done when he left these words lying on top of the final proofs of that
>great book of nostalgia _Prisoner of Love_:
>
> 'Put all the images in language in a place of
> safety and make use of them, for they are in the
> desert, and it's in the desert we must go
> and look for them.'
>
>
>best wishes
>
>
>--
>Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]>
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