"When you live in the past, you're never lonely"[33]
In this chapter, the role of nostalgia is to be explored to investigate and
confirm the relevance of the nostalgia to souvenir. To undertake this task
it is necessary to provide a thorough interpretation of this term. Nostalgia
is defined in the Wordsworth dictionary as: "homesickness-: a sentimental
longing for past times."[34] Anne Friedberg,
author of Window shopping affirms this interpretation and defines the condition
of nostalgia is "from the Greek, nostos = a return; algos= painful means a
painful return, a longing for something far away or long ago, separated by
distance and time."[35] She also asserts that:
"An etymological history of the word nostalgia demonstrates that its first usage in the late seventeenth century was to describe the longing for a space, a technical term for "home sickness." "[36]
There is also a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that the etymological history of the word, nostalgia, not only refers to an emotional or a psychological state related to feelings of loss, but also has a history related to physical aspects of the body. This presented as a form of illness, which was the result of extended periods away from home. Nostalgia had the propensity to be life endangering if one was to leave home for too long. David Lowenthal also researched the etymological roots of the word nostalgia, locating it primarily in medical history, "where it had been originally regarded as a disease with physical symptoms that were the result of homesickness."[37] Lowenthal refers to the 17th century description of nostalgia, as described in 1688 by Johannes Hofer as an illness where the " continuous vibration of animal spirits through the fibers of the middle brain in which the impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling."[38] He comments further that "a physician found the lungs of nostalgia victims tightly adhered to the pleura of the thorax, the tissue of the lobe thickened and purulent...To leave home for long was to risk death."[39]
In some ways, this analogy resembles Foucault's analysis of the physical symptoms apparent in the condition of melancholia around the same era, which he loosely defines as the classical age. In the case of melancholia, the afflicted suffer from a blackness of spirit that eventually spread throughout the body, affecting their mobility and making them lethargic. Ian Douglas refers to Foucault's text Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, where Foucault believed that the "problem of mobility"[40] and its effects on the body was central to the identification and diagnosis of madness and insanity during this time. Mania was related to an "excessive mobility of the fibres, leading to a lightness in disposition, and melancholia to a congestion and thickening of the blood, and subsequent dullness of character."[41] Taking this into account, the relationship between notions of mobility and mania, and the perception of nostalgia as being related to absence from home, could possibly indicate why nostalgia first emerged as a medical condition.
As time shifts, so do the meanings and contexts of certain words. Language is a fluid phenomenon and is always subtly shifting in meaning, the syntax continually expanding and contracting to accommodate the current usage of words. Foucault refers to this process of shifting contextuality, with specific reference to his studies into the discourses of madness in the text, The archeology of knowledge stating that:
"One might, perhaps one should, conclude from this multiplicity of objects that it is not possible to accept, as a valid unity forming a group of statements, a 'discourse, concerning madness'. Perhaps one should confine one's attention to those groups of statements that have one and the same object: the discourses on melancholia, or neurosis, for example. But one would soon realise that each of these discourses in turn constituted its object and worked it to the point of transforming it altogether."[42]
In other words, potentially any type or mode of interpretation can plot this process of transformation onto any object of inquiry. In Foucault's example the subject is melancholia, in this project the focus is the social relationships which characterise the identity of souvenirs, with nostalgia acting as one of them. Nostalgia's physical and psychological effects may be similar to that of melancholia, though nostalgia has a direct relation or causal relationship to being absent from and longing for home. Melancholia apparently arises from lethargy, perhaps a result of being stuck at home.
Since the late 19th century, there is no longer a connection between the medical and emotive aspects of nostalgia, just as melancholia is now predominately seen as an emotive state which has no physical characteristics beyond that of a psychological condition. Nostalgia as we now understand it, has emerged in our consciousness as only relative to a state of mind, without a locating device such as a geographical pinpoint defined as home to posit these feelings of alienation and longing. In our contemporary understanding of the world, the notion of home is multilayered, diasporic and fragmented - a result of the development of transmigration and globalisation. Otherwise, nostalgia is completely manufactured as a genre of merchandise from the souvenir entrepreneurs of history who manufacture and market anything from memorable events to old movies, advertising, products, national and provincial culture. Nostalgia, it could be argued in contemporary culture is the cornerstone of the tourism, national culture, fashion, film and antique industry. In other words, we can potentially plot feelings of nostalgia on whatever is worthy of remembering and yearning for in our past - be it place or event.
The context of souvenir objects appears as relational to notions of the home and domestic space through their manifestations as nostalgic and material 'evidence' of time spent on holidays. Also, the prospect of home incurs a connection to everyday experience and the mundane, rather than the experience of the holiday and tour, which refer to the context of being 'away' or absent from home. There is an implicit engagement with notions of the body, the self and the construction of identity, primarily because home is the main arena where people create their reality and sense of self on a day to day level through the familiar objects and images in which they surround themselves. The objects gathered whilst away also act as a form of embellishment on a physical level, as the object is an addition to the home environment. This is the museum of the personal, where visitors are either willing or unwitting audiences to the hosts memorial 'evidence' and narration's of the past, co-opted as second-hand witnesses to the events.
These objects have the propensity to operate on a notion of the 'partial double' - a Freudian term which deals with the manifestations of representation and desire which accompany such conditions as fetishism, with the object standing in for feelings of loss. This relationship between object and possessor is potentially sacred, with the object being imbrued with a power almost magical - by having the capability to communicate and by having the power to tangibly occupy one space whilst symbolising another temporal and geographical site. Fiske, Hodge and Turner argue in Myths of Oz that the holiday can have this effect because it is an event away from the context of home:
"The most obvious point about a holiday trip is that it moves the family away from home and from work. It interrupts the normal secular life and transfers it into the abnormal or the 'sacred', the 'magic'."[43]
They go on to comment that "holidays are breaks from the normal construction of identity by work and home."[44] The social origins of such a phenomenon as 'holidays' which arose in the development of class societies had a great impact on defining a psychological and physical space external to the normal, everyday world of home and work:
"The word holiday was originally 'holy day', a day in which neither wage-labour nor domestic-labour was allowed its usual dominance over the thinking, behavior and therefore social identities of the people."[45]
Holy days were marked as important in the community, and often were occasions for festivals and events, celebrating religious days and festivals around the agricultural calendar - Bakhtin's discussion on the carnival grotesque concentrates specifically of these occurrences. The desire to create history whether personal/national/corporate is consciously forged on any number of levels; from the state, to advertising, to communities, schools, families, and the personal sphere of the individual.
In the context of this research paper, the focus is, of course, on the realm of the individual. Nostalgic desire, as opposed to other forms of desire, lies somewhere between resemblance and identity, because it is enamored by or attracted to substance - being the souvenir. The past is constructed and made whole by piecing together the remaining fragmented memories - there is no resemblance, no continuous identity beyond this existence. A gap appears from that moment of contact widens as time distances the past from the present. Susan Stewart attributes these desires to reanimate the past to the development and expansion of capitalist interests.
"Within the development of culture under an exchange economy, the search for authentic experience and, correlatively, the search for the authentic object become critical. As experience is mediated and abstracted, the lived relation to the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence."[46]
The tourist souvenir represents the past to the owner - and is significant because of that past moment of transference and contact. Combined with the importance or significance of the site, this object is loved regardless of whether it is a gift, merchandise or found object. This is why nostalgia may be thought of as a transcendent experience - as it is idealised and removed from bodily experience. Lived experience, in the present context of the phenomenological world assists nostalgia to the goal of closure as it cancels out nostalgia's reason for existence. This is because you can simultaneously be in the present while remembering a past experience. Often these recollections come when something in the present reminds us, or is similar to that past event/site. Whilst living in the mental space of the past, the present is often deemed as less important or special.
The souvenir becomes the object of desire because it can serve these purposes for the possessor, by representing in concrete form that past moment in time. Nostalgia is a primary motive for keeping and hoarding such objects, a condition arising from the need to identify the self through experiences absent from the context of 'now'. Because of the varying meanings of the term nostalgia depending on the usage, it is not simply just a desire for the past, it is a license to embellish, idealise and recreate a moment according to the narrator's perception of the truth. The notion of time is of the essence here, as the past is mythologised and distanced from the present.
In regard to the placement of time in the case of nostalgia, Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase state in The dimensions of nostalgia: The imagined past: history and nostalgia that nostalgia is possible at the same time as utopia. They also recognise that nostalgia does not always only relate to events in the past by making this comment: "The counterpart to the imagined future is the imagined past. But there is one crucial respect in which the power of the past is different. It has generated objects, images and texts which can be seen as powerful talismans of how things used to be."[47] Conceding that the development of such object repositories has exploded over the last century they state that we are "not short of such reminders for the volume of text and image available seems to have grown at an almost exponential rate this century."[48]
Also, they make the observation that the most potent of all objects in the quest for enshrining the past is the photograph. "Of all these emblems of how we were, the photograph has been identified as the paradigm case of the moment of nostalgia."[49] Believing that photography is "an elegiac art, a twilight zone.... All photographs are memento mori."[50] They argue that to take a photograph "is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt."[51]
Shaw and Chase make the conclusion that "such variations of meaning and emphasis were evidence that nostalgia was not a one-dimensional concept with clean-cut edges. This is not necessarily a reflection of anything so dull as mere confusion surrounding the word. Rather it suggests that the concept is protean and pervasive, a site occupied by ideas and structures of feeling which have a family resemblance."[52]
This argument was not without precedence, in 1985 David Lowenthal also commented thus on nostalgia and its relationship to familial ties: "If nostalgia is a symptom of malaise, it also has compensating virtues. Attachment to familiar places may buffer social upheaval attachment to familiar faces may be necessary for enduring association."[53] This family resemblance has its roots based in the home and what the home represents. But the position of temporality in this association to nostalgic desire may vary - from imagining a future holiday or reminiscing about a past journey. However, does nostalgia for the souvenir set in before the purchase, because the tourist misses home, or, does it take place when the souvenir is installed at the home of the possessor? It is commonplace for people to buy souvenirs for others when they are on holidays, friends and family - who the tourist may be thinking of whilst away. Once the tourist returns home, the souvenirs kept of the holiday nostalgically memorialise their time away, acting as a reminder and testimonial of that time. These souvenirs may also be located as symbolising the 'exotic' and the 'other' as they are objects which are unfamiliar and not from home. Fiske, Hodge and Turner rightly argue that "the house may have become a metaphor for the self and the body, but unlike the body it is fixed and immovable."[54] Souvenirs are objects that stand in for those experiences occurring external to the domestic space of the home.
The perception of home is a feeling, which we inscribe on particular sites and locations, without necessarily being geographically fixed, or focused spatially or concretely - potentially we all have the capacity to create our own notion of home. The shift in society to a more de-centred model has created these alienated feelings of longing - the tourists search for authenticity often involves making contact with cultural others who are seen has having a sense community which have been lost on the home front. David Lowenthal states that "those who lack links with a place must forge an identity through other pasts. Immigrants cut off from their roots remain dislocated; discontinuity impels many who grow up in pioneer lands either to exaggerate attachments to romanticised homelands or stridently to assert an adoptive belonging."[55] Christopher Shaw, and Malcolm Chase state that "the home we miss is no longer a geographically defined place but rather a state of mind."[56] They also make the statement that:
"By the late nineteenth century, as the discourses of history produced a con commit (sic) idealisation of the past, nostalgia also came to mean a longing for a time past. Late nineteenth century revival styles and museology encouraged a return to the past, as if to compensate for the "threat" of the modern and the shock of the new. Nostalgia can hide the discontinuities between the present and the past; it falsifies, turning the past into a safe, familiar place."[57]
As we become a more transient society, the influence of the family has gradually been eroded in favour of state-imposed values regarding home and country. Symbols of family and clan (for instance coats of arms) have been overtaken by generalised ideas about nationhood - in Australia we have images like the kangaroo and Uluru, as well as symbolic archetypes like the bushies, Anzacs and bronzed Aussie to affirm a sense of national identity. Steiner refers to Umberto Eco's argument that "we have returned to an appreciation of the familiar as it is expressed in inter textual dialogue and to the 'aesthetics of seriality' in popular art and mass media."[58] The rules and modes of conduct as described by ancestral ties link to various notions of the past, has shifted because of the migration which occurred in the 20th century. What eventuates is a notion of identity set forth by the state and repeated constantly to remind citizens of who they are. Lowenthal states in relation to this scenario that:
"Various social modalities - family, peers, neighbourhood, ethnicity, state - validate various pasts, their custodial roles waxing and waning. As education becomes more centralised and parents increasingly reluctant or impotent consciously to impose beliefs on their offspring, the family has grown less and the state more significant as a transmitter of tradition."[59]
As mentioned earlier, the souvenir relates also specifically to notions of the exotic, as well as having the propensity to include the childlike realm of the primitive. Baudrillard's proposition in La systeme des objets is that the exotic object, like the antique, functions to lend authority and authenticity to abstract systems of modern objects. Stewart comments in response that "the authenticity of the exotic object arises not in the conditions authored by the primitive culture itself but from the analogy between the primitive/exotic and the origin of the possessor, the authentic 'nature' of that radical otherness which is the possessor's own childhood."[60]
Baudrillard also considers the modern 'cold' and the exotic 'warm' because contemporary mythology places the latter in a childhood remote and abstract from the capitalist world. Tourist art and merchandise conforms to the demands of the market, its objects molded to the wishes of the tourist en mass, created in response to a market need as identified by the tourism industry, in collaboration with local entrepreneurs and state authorities. This is a very ironic scenario as the desire of the tourist to consume such objects is to identify that object for its authentic context to a place or an event. Nostalgia (something to take home) is the agent for securing such merchandise for future warm and fuzzy memorials. Stewart acknowledges this process as symptomatic of the more general cultural imperialism that is tourism's stock in trade. Phillips and Steiner make the following observation about the process of acquiring objects from unfamiliar sources and places by stating that:
"Consumers were motivated both by a genuine admiration for the technical expertise and aesthetic ability of non western artists and, like the anthropologists, by a romantic and nostalgic desire for the 'primitive' induced by the experience of modernization."[61]
Again, we see a desire to escape from the world of the present and the everyday, by the level of appreciation for cultural objects seen to represent a connection with a pre modern existence. They also comment that "just as all 'ethnic' worlds are thought somehow to be closer to nature than their 'modern' counterpart, so too these ethnic worlds are thought to share attributes that bond them together in a 'fraternity of otherness'."[62] A process which defined a means of "making them mutually intelligible to one another while remaining uniformly foreign, and sometimes wondrous, to those who inhabit the West."[63]
The ownership of such an item is deemed as a way of capturing and colonising the cultural other, as a means to validate the tourists contact with the local culture. Phillips and Steiner propose that the "possession of an exotic object offers, too, access to an imagined world of difference, often constituted as an enhancement of the new owner's knowledge, power, or wealth."[64] They also recognise, in line with Stewart that "the exotic object may be variously labeled trophy or talisman, relic or specimen, rarity or trade sample, souvenir or kitsch, art or craft."[65] In the context of collecting culture over the last one hundred and fifty years or so, these categories have been the linchpin of defining material culture. They go on to comment that "for the last century or so, the objects of cultural others have been appropriated primarily into two of these categories: the artifact or ethnographic specimen or the work of art."[66]
It is also recognised by Steiner et al how problematic the process of delineating categories for material from other cultures. They state that "as a construction however, this binary pair has almost always been unstable, for both classifications masks what had, by the late nineteenth century, become on of the most important factors of objects: their operation as commodities circulating in the discursive space of an emergent capitalist economy."[67]
These types of objects, particularly those associated with the Indigenous culture of a site, have also evolved and changed from a process of engagement with the West. Steiner and Phillips ultimately concede to acknowledging the ironic position of art historical and anthropological collections in their attempts to determine these items as 'authentic' and traditional, as being somehow removed from the alienating chain of industry. To maintain this type of thinking highlights the power nostalgia holds in the construction of cultural identity. They also argue that "the makers of objects have frequently manipulated commodity production in order to serve economic needs as well as new demands for the self-representation and self-identification made urgent by the establishment of colonial hegemonies."[68]
Because the present post-industrial world and its objects are often not seen as having as much cultural value or significance, it is not surprising that developing links to the past via nostalgia is a viable alternative to the cold reality of now. The alienation and search for security in a postmodern world of displacement and anxiety is definitely a catalyst for the manifestation of desires to collect souvenirs for the impending benefit of nostalgia. Bryan S. Turner, author of Orientalism, postmodernism and globalism, states that there are several solutions for the problem of modernism, all of which draw on some aspect of nostalgia. Drawing largely on Nietzsche he contends that there are "four primary solutions to the problem of modernism. First, there is the aesthetic solution through artistic creation which Nietzsche regarded as a particularly powerful expression of all yeas-saying practices, since art, especially in the pure form of music, was free of the immediate constraints of nihilism and resentment."[69] It is fair to argue that in terms of a capacity to evoke nostalgia, music has a major capacity to capture the afflicted in a state of transcendent reverie for past events; nostalgia has the ability to affect all senses. Turner argues later that:
"There is a genuinely nostalgic negation of the present in favour of some imaginary place constituted prior to the devastating consequences of urban industrial rational capitalism. Within the paradigm, the modern is totally rejected by a nostalgic reconstitution of communities."[70]
He further acknowledges that "this nostalgic paradigm was particularly significant in the emergence of sociology as a nostalgic analysis of communal relations."[71] But it was not only the emergence of sociology as a discipline but also the emergence of all the other arts and sciences of the academy which examined the past, all creating their discrete systems for the naming of objects.
Such reminders of the good old days have the propensity to act as agents to carry traditions which have bearing on social and cultural etiquette's to the next generation. As possibly one of the most potent ways of dealing with the alienation of contemporary world, religion serves well to divert attention away from the reality of the everyday and the present moment, in favour of a better time in the future. Organised religion is also a way of sating such yearning feelings very similar to nostalgia, because it will all be better (perfect) in heaven; again we see a denial of the present in favour of a distant elsewhere. Turner states that the third solution of modernity comes via Max Weber, by stating that he "identified a flight into the arms of the church as a typically nostalgic response to modernity."[72]
These material forms which represent feelings of nostalgia are not only a denial of the present they act as a denial of the body, because they are partial objects that exist beyond corporeal and phenomenological experience. Turner in summing up states that lastly, "there is Nietzsche's solution, which was in two parts. Rejecting nostalgia, Nietzsche argued that we have no substitute for 'God' and therefore we should develop new values that would express rather than deny the body, emotion and feeling. "[73]
Nietzcshe may have wanted us to embrace the new, but I doubt he would have been prepared for the resulting values of this 'new' world, despite his rejection of nostalgia. Now there are more contrived forms of nostalgia - for instance commerialised, mass produced souvenirs have the capacity to represent a manufactured notion of nostalgia. However, this is still a process that intersects with personal nostalgia on a temporal basis, although appearing forced or duplicated by way of its status as merchandise. The issue more specifically is how these objects operate as tenets of 'authenticity' to the owner. For instance, tourism relies on the desire of the tourist to ultimately consume the product, which is portrayed and offered at point of sale. If this missive is successful, tourists spend more money on the merchandise which has been pre constructed and developed in anticipation of the tourists desire to take home a memento of the journey. In the purchase of merchandise, the moment of exchange guarantees the objects future as a memento and souvenir. This interchange transfers signification from the contrived to the personal, it is the moment of truth for both owner and the object. After that the relationship is which inscribed between the two is ultimately a nostalgic one.