Whenever we delve, out of particular interest or mere reverie, into the marshes of history, trying to make sense of the way human beings used to live, we are unlikely to dig up something like a universal human experience. After all, if we merely assume that things have always been the way they are today, we lose the aspect of the ‘used to’, which is what encourages us to write something like history in the first place. More than that, the presupposition of invariable sameness does not explain the sentiment, ubiquitous today, of nostalgia, which does not merely conjure up the blissful innocence of one’s youth, but expresses the experience of an irreversible change, where one’s way of inhabiting the world has undergone fundamental modifications. But it is precisely because they are experienced affectively, as a change of atmosphere, that the traces of transformation are often effaced in history.
If the intuitive association of nostalgia with youth or childhood is nevertheless justified, the reason might lie in its yearning for bliss, an atmosphere of safety and protectedness. But the same affectivity can be underlying times of hope, where the modifications of the lived world are undergone under a positive sign; not merely the curse of ‘interesting times’, but the new horizons of ‘exciting times’. Were we to understand such encompassing sentiments as the foundation of unity of a historical epoch, which is paradoxically accessible only to the now and its memory of all that has been lost, we might be justified in seeing the unity of our today in the generalised atmosphere of suffocation. It is not merely the breathlessness of the staccato-like news cycle, of the heatwaves, and the economic recessions – it is a state of futurelessness, where the now suddenly resists all significant changes – beyond the continuity of steady decadence -, and suddenly inundates even the past with the desperate resignation of: “It has always been this way.” It is in closed rooms that the air becomes heavy, or in the vertiginous mountains of solitude. What has become closed to us is the present. Suffocation, unbearable, gives way to desperate attempts to find a way out.
While nostalgia, in making us dream of what has been lost, seems to confront us with the evidence that things do change, it can conjure the images of the past only as that which has been lost forever. The presupposition of reversibility, which underlies any active attempt to overcome nostalgia by restoring the good order, is in that sense based on a contradiction. In its restorative attempts to expurgate the very nature of ‘loss’, the experience of irreversibility, it implicitly accepts the idea of ever-sameness, which it explicitly denies. If things “have always been this way,” there’s nothing to yearn for in the first place. For nostalgia, then, if there are changes, they are merely superficial, the temporary victory of all the decadent forces that disturb the way thing should be. But, in bringing back only mirages, in compulsively perpetuating the experience of loss, it only accrues the sentiment of empty-handedness, of a swelling void devouring all that it holds dear. The present becomes a glass-house, and what is more suffocating than that?
But this also shows the limit of the atmospheric model, where it seems like we can merely will switching from suffocating nostalgia to breathful hope, but also from hope back to suffocation. While the atmosphere might constitute the unity of a now, it cannot constitute its uniqueness. Only that which is unique can be lost, but also preserved in history. But we said that atmospheres are not chosen, but undergone, lived as something imposed. What imposes an atmosphere, what creates it, are the material conditions. These, in turn, are as much produced as they are reproduced, providing the network of all that we can and can’t do. The atmosphere is a function of possibility, of the potentiality of a future as much of as the fecundity of a past. But possibility itself is a function of the material conditions, which, in being each time unique, are the reason for the irreversibility of change. Suffocating means living in impossibility, in complete powerlessness vis-à-vis the present material conditions. It’s as if things were slipping from our hands, which is when we desperately start grabbing anything. But instead of grabbing a sentiment, the feeling of bliss and protection, the desire to be saved – by someone, anyone -, might it not be more fruitful to grab that which is graspable, namely the material conditions that we helplessly keep reproducing? It is clear that this is not one of those questions where the answer can be given.