APORTES A PARAFISCALES

In contrast with the renewing or progressive conception of nostalgia, in which it is used to affect positive changes for the future, some see it as a call to return to a past state. While both types might be framed as a longing for a better world, the difference is whether that world is an imagined state that must be prospectively constructed, or whether it is retrospectively thought of as once having existed and now disappeared, inspiring regret as a result. In its most extreme state, nostalgia’s regret for loss would be apparent as a form of Freudian melancholia, a state of perpetual and unresolved mourning. Yet, attitudes towards the past can be expressed in various ways. Since the middle of the twentieth century, it is this conceptualization of nostalgia that has dominated not only artistic creations on the theme but also most mediatic as well as scholarly uses of the term. Even though scholars attempt to expose complex variations of this nostalgic feeling according to political, communicative, or social perspectives, the vast majority of these variations relate to the regret of a bygone past. Whether we talk about a golden age, personal or collective memory, commemorative practices, or even about technostalgia, hauntology, post-memory (or prosthetic memory), or mnemonic imagination, nostalgia is triggered by the regret of a loss, even if its functions vary from one case to another.66

One of the most influential insights into the processes of nostalgia remains Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. Boym further developed analysis of nostalgia’s relation to the past by distinguishing between two main types: on the one hand, restorative nostalgia proposes to rebuild the lost world, to reconstruct the monuments of the past, and to claim a lost perfect unity;

66 _{It is impossible to provide a bibliography of all these variations. I will just mention a few examples: the}

issue on “L’Âge d’or” from the journal Le Temps des medias, no. 27 (2016); Tim van der Heijden, “Technostalgia of the Present: From Technologies of Memory to a Memory of Technologies,” European

Journal of Media Studies 4, no. 2 (2015): 103–21; Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression,

Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014); Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of

Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012);

Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering, The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice

on the other hand, reflective nostalgia lingers in the memory in full awareness that the desired past is unrecoverable. Whereas the former is typical of many nationalist movements that engage in the “antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths,” the latter tells the relationship between past, present, and future, and “cherishes shattered fragments of memory,” without pretending to reconstruct them.67 The restoration of the past is akin to the previous paradigm of nostalgia as promise (as we saw with Tiersot), but with Boym, the promise of an idealized world is resolutely anchored in the restitution of ruins of a lost past, not in the idealization of a different future. On the reflective side, musical remembrances of lost love became a common theme in “nostalgia” songs, as in Nostalgie d’amour (lyrics by Gaston Deval and music by Paul Fauchey, 1907). Similarly, memories of childhood were denoted as “Nostalgie,” pointing to the regret for a lost childhood rather than to its playfulness and naivety (as in one of Nicolas Sursock’s Pièces enfantines for piano from 1923). By articulating this double nostalgia, Boym did not intend to present a clear separation between two distinct modalities, but rather to show tendencies within which her stories and studies took place. However, it is the practical aspect of this distinction that has been retained by scholars.

Why then group here in a single paradigm of regret a field of research that has proven so rich and diverse? My intent is not to reduce five decades of research to a single concept—on the contrary, although it is sometimes difficult to navigate the terminological maze of nostalgia (for which epithets and labels abound), this diversity is conducive to the exploration of ideas constantly readjusted to the changing reality of the contemporary world. Nevertheless, by grouping these ideas into one larger paradigm, I wish to draw attention to some neglected aspects of nostalgia, since ignoring the other major lines of research may hinder more thorough scholarly exchanges around subjects whose premises are similar. For example—to return to the French music of the previous century—one can observe that nostalgia expressed in commemorations of the past may be

misinterpreted, even distorted, if it is considered only from one perspective, if only elements of the fourth paradigm are considered. This is the case, for instance, of the Tombeau de Claude Debussy, which I discuss in chapter 2, a controversial collective homage that refused to express a unified sense of commemorative nostalgia. As I show throughout this dissertation, the diffusion of nostalgia by the media can sometimes render it mute, hidden, repressed, or contradictory. It is by paying more attention to this kind of paradox and to the signs of other paradigms in the mediatization of nostalgic regrets that we can better explain each particular case.