The Nostalgia isease Sven Birkerts Once there was another city here, and now it?s gone. There are almost no traces of it anymore, but millions of us know it existed, because we lived in it: the Lost City of New York. It was a city, as John Cheever once wrote, that ?was still ?lled with river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner station- ery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.? In that city, the taxicabs were all Checkers, with ample room for your legs, and the drivers all knew where Grand Central was and always helped with the lug- gage. In that city, there were apartments with three bedrooms and views of the river: You hurried across the street and your girl was waiting for you under the Biltmore clock, with snow melting in her hair ?Pete Hamill, ?The New York We?ve Lost? subject here is not the great, perhaps van- ished, city of New York, but rather nostalgia, that peculiar condition wherein memory fuses with desire to create a pain that is very nearly pleasur- able. Or a pleasure verging upon pain. I picked the opening passage of the lead essay from a special issue of New York magazine (December 1987?entitled ?You Must Remember This?) to identify a particular frequency or tone. But almOSt any passage from any of the other essays could have served as well, so limited are the op- tions of the mode. The writer assembles luminous details from the archive of the remembered?or fantasied?past. The details declare an order that was once natural and whole, against .which the present is viewed as hopelessly fallen. And it works. Even though I had no experience of the city in those storied times, I felt a bittersweet pang. Like everyone, I have my own New Yorks, my own lost better days. I cited the Hamill passage, too, because it was handy? I?d saved the magazine to brood over. But in truth I could have lowered my net almost anywhere: our culture is awash like never before in repackaged bits of the past. We find them on screen and radio, in books and magazines, even in the posturing about patriotism and Sven Birkerts recently published The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry (William Morrow and Co., 1989). 20 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2 ?family values? that so recently confused our electoral process. Our appetite for the stuff is bottomless. We have just emerged from eight years of a nostalgia presidency? a grand, collective bathing in the images and pieties of an earlier, less cynical and compromised era (what an irony: here was the most ruthless cynicism, here were the gravest there is no Sign that the impulse is slackening. Indeed, nostalgia now threatens to become a permanent feature of our cultural life, a kind of ground bass against which we play our changing ideals and aspirations. Consider just a few of its recent manifestations. On television, the closest thing we have to a national we not only have shows like ?thirtysomething,? ?Wonder Years,? ?China Beach,? and ?Almost Grown,? but every second commercial comes wrapped in the musical and visual tissue of the past. The radio dial lands on oldies and rock ?classics? with each turn of the wrist. Or else it gets stuck on yet another repeat broadcast of one of Garrison Keillor?s down-home Lake Wobegon mono- logues. Recent movies that have more or less success- fully mined the vein include 1969, Eight Men Out, Bull Durham (an odd instance of nostalgia filtered through the present), Tucker, Stand By Me, Everybody?s All- American, and Imagine.- ]ohn Lennon, to name just a few. And wherever we look we see headlines beaming the return of Elvis, or yet another anniversary special on JFK, Marilyn, or 1968. . . . The barons of mid-cult have grasped the formula for success. Processions of what we?ve somehow lost?once we?ve been tipped off that that?s what they are?are as irresistible as sex and scan- dal. It appears that our desire for the clarity and certainty of the imagined past will batten repeatedly on certain sure?re images. Country roads, weathered barns, city scenes with fedoras and oldfangled cars, beaded hippies ?ashing peace signs: all that matters is that these emblems tell us how we were before self-consciousness and frag- mentation af?icted us. Before everything changed. Some might argue that nostalgia has always been with us, that we find the longing for a better past in Sappho and Homer, as well as in Norman Rockwell and Currier Ives. And to be sure, all of us, as individuals, experience nostalgia sharply at times?more sharply, I think, as we grow older. This was as true of our great- grandparents as it is now of us. But something is clif- ferent. The impulse has deepened and strengthened; it has become commodi?ed. Where once it may have waxed and waned in the self and the culture, it is now a constant?we live by looking over our shoulders. he reasons for this are many. But chief among them is the fact that we now have a technology for collective cultural experience that did not exist even ?fty years ago. Pulsa- tions did not then move thrOugh the whole of the body politic, certainly not at such a rate or intensity. We were nor joined, as we are now, by a ?nely meshed electronic net. We were not then alerted at every instant to the universalized state of things. Ville brooded over the dis- appearing past privately, more fitfully. echnology and media are part of the equation; changing historical circumstances are another. Nostalgia could not have thrived so vigorously in an earlier day because people were not so mesmerized by the past. Present and future held too strong a claim on the attentionathere was too much to be done just to survive, to inch forward into the future. No longer. In the past few decades everything abOut the way life is lived has altered. At some point in the post?World \?(lar II period, technological and societal changes attained critical mass. Suddenly (at least from a historical vantage point} the bedrock certainties about our experience of reality shifted and assumed new con?gurations. we are now squarely?and perhaps irrevocably?stuck in a frag- mented and self-conscious condition that some have labeled ?postmodernism? (I will take this up shortly). And nostalgia is now no longer an occasional ?brillation in the is more akin to the persistent sensation felt by the amputee in his or her ?phantom? limb. The reasons for this change are fairly obvious, at least on the surface. We are, all creatures of habit, programmed to desire constancy and security. But it happens that we now ?nd ourselves in a world that is locked into an ever-intensifying spiral of change. One could argue that our fundamental modes and have been altered more since the 19405 than during all the millenia that came before. Until then?? andl must generalize?we lived in relation to an ancient and familiar paradigm of country and city. True, we had mass?production industries and air travel. But most individuals could, if pressed, have found the continuity between their way of life and the age-old human pattern. Things are radically different now. For most of our hundreds of millions of citizens, the city-country dis? tinction has been exploded into the anonymous surround of the megasuburb. We can no longer just look around to see where we ?t into the scheme. Analogously, the physical ties of family and community have come un- raveled, only partly replaced by the pseudoimmediacy of telephone communications. And how we do what we do?nor to mention the tuba! itself? has been revolu- tionized past recognition. Information crisscrosses the enuntry on screens and via fax machines; business gets conducted from terminal to terminal. We look up from the panel just long ennugh to see whether we need our galoshes or sunglassescushion our spent selves with vivid washes of music and the numbing ?icker of televised images. Nostalgia 23 tlae response elicited by the simpli?ed and stylized image? t/ye general store, tlae old porle swing, grandma handing out lemonade. I exaggerate, of course. But it is to make a point: that our private and public worlds are changing faster than our response mechanisms can cope. Change itself is changing, upping its rate with merciless regularity. And the threat of the world?headlined by AIDS, drugs, political corruption, nuclear arms, environmental panic, and violent crime?looms larger than ever before. On top of this, there is now the sense that the changes are ?nal, that we are not going to rouse ourselves and go back to old ways. The momentum is too great; it is beyond the control of any government or organization. If once we moved expectantly into the future, we now cower before it. \that we hOpe, above all else, is to squeak through without getting hurt too badly. Our longing for what we perceive as the certainties of the past is, of course, only partly conscious. We carry it around as a need, as something akin to a biological drive. Or a defense, a place to run to. Or a mode of orientation. Our picture of the past, preserved, ampli?ed by the incessant images that envelop us, becomes an internal compass; the more lost we feel, the more often we need to refer to it. A fact, as have suggested, that is hardly lost on our politicians and imagebrokers. Their instincts zero in on the true condition of the populace more quickly and accurately than any market survey could hope to. As our need intensi?es?it does so daily?~50 does the purveying of packaged offerings. More and more every day, the past is being offered to us as a commodity for consumption. We learn to react to our sense of loss by taking out our pocketbooks. Nostalgia is the easy response of the individual who feels cut off from the past, from the secure continuity of tradition. It is a compensatory re?ex before the anxiety of disconnectedness. The avoids the hard NOSTALGIA DISEASE 21 indicator of progress, of directional movement into the 1. i future, has shattered. The great eras of growth and innovation are ended. We are postindustrialist, post- . uadi??dnajphuos'ophyl me and everything; there are no more terrestrial frontiers. What's The?editdrs invite Submissionsgofamdes, essays, more, cultural energies (like our natural resources) are 1, giftiprrsit r50". accounts Short?c?on-y mark and reviews depleted. The kinds of transformations that now lie in 2' reilecl'the?enpcumet of? traditional religious store for us are mainly organizational?they involve new distribution of information and re?ned modes of . ,zgamWQ?OlihOdOX processing (computerization), as well as a more thorough 1] igla?lld?fnon?onhwo?f i saturation of every societal sphere by the electronic 3 I 7 - A media. In the arts, the subject of so much postmodernist Sf 7; theorizing, we no longer look to an avant-garde pushing i p? . -, I 3 its vector into the unknown; we no longer think of art 1 (5749}: I . ,1 .5 as discovery. Instead, we have an aeSthetics of combina- I ?Vlr?m tion, the presentation of old materials. 3 Gitlin sums up this aesthetic quite concisely in his . ?tianizatigjh?ofiJadaISm:si At 1: Ktajkaaetgonaifemente essay; ,1 1 JeWrygE: jCarnFs ,Meditationsiatrhe.Kote?~ . i gn,J?w315?ahdfci ?1 Post-modernism is indifferent to consistency "If . i i' if and continuity altogether. It self-consciously splices puplj3??d genres, attitudes, styles. It relishes the blurring or i '0 juxtaposition of forms stances i sari (straight-ironic), cultural levels (high-low). It disdains originality and fancies copies, repetition, the re- combination of hand-me-down scraps. It neither embraces nor criticizes, but beholds the world blankly, with a knowingness that dissolves feeling and commitment into irony. It pulls the rug out from under itself, displaying an acute self-consciousness about the work?s constructed nature. It takes pleasure in the play of surfaces and derides the search for depth as mere nostalgia for an unmoved mover. fifublished iatlgd' tarp?mtio?f? - work of mourning and tries to ?ll its void with a set of images. Here I should clarify one thing: that these are almost never images of the real thing. For the real thing, truly recalled, places one in danger of grief. Nostalgia is the response elicited by the simpli?ed and stylized image?the general store, the old porch swing, Among the proponents of this aesthetic, Gitlin cites grandma handing out lemonade. The more stylized it artists like David Byrne, Robert Wilson, John Ashbery, gets, the closer we are to kitsch. Nostalgia is a look at Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, David Hockney, Italo the past, an attempted emotional connection, that comes Calvino, and Don DeLillo. Of the ?vision? itself he after desire has falsi?ed and colorized it. There is little writes: or no true relation to the event as we might have experi- . . . . In effect est-modernism ex resses the iritless enced it while embedded in the then-uncertain present. spirit of a global class linked via borderless mass . . . . media With mass culture, omnivorous consumption his brings us, in not all that roundabout fashion, . . . . . and easy travel. Their experience denies the con- to a constderatlon of the so-called postmod- .. . . . tinuit of histor 'the live in a er etual resent ern condition. Postmodernism, as Todd y? . . . . arnished nostal ia bin es. ace is not real pomted out in a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review (?Hip-Deep in Post-Modernism,? November 6, only ?me 1988), has become the buzzword of the late 19805. I would disagree only with the last sentence. A sense Pundits invoke the term to explain anything from shifts of time wherein all events and products can be viewed in the styles of art to all-embracing transformations in as contemporaneous is hardly ?real.? The whole point the world at large. The sifting of applications will go on of the postmodern project is to af?rm that our connec- for some time. Still, a general ground of assumptions, tion to history has been ruptured. We have left the old or contentions, can be identi?ed. perspective?~which saw styles and expressions as natu- Brie?y, postmodernism espouses the view that a per~ rally bound to their times?and have embraced a manent change has taken place in Western culture in perspective of hyperconscious pluralism. Overrun with the past few decades. The time line, which was the (Continued on p. 117) 22 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2 and a sexist legal strategisr share blame. Elana Steinberg, brutally slain, was innocent of all crimes. She did not deserve to die, and the epithet JAP?that provided her killer?s ticket to freedom has a dangerous power ?ttingly dramatized by the story The State ofAt-z'zoim Steve Smother-g. Yet in Our haste to bury the epithet we must be very cautious nor to go Frondorf?s way, not to naturalize as Jewish those values that happen to be held by Jews, not to shore up those of Jewish American culture that call a woman?s desperate narcissism her freedom, and her economic helplessness her tradition. To question the materialism of Jews is not to defame Jewish culture any more than to notice Elana Steinberg's straitened life is to murder her or her tradition. That tradition is accustomed to taking history in stride. NOSTALGIA DISEASE (Confirmed from p. 22) information and stimulus, we have lost a distinct sense of what our time means or how it differs from (and grows out from) former times. We respond to our confusion by browsing freely and indiscriminately among the relics and styles of the past. Everything flows together, unsutured by any sense of causal connection or sequence. And when there are no laws about how things ?t together, irony? bemused detachment?is the inevitable consequence. ?Nostalgia,? the word, comes from the Greek nortor, which means to return home and survive. Webster?s Third New International Dictionary gives the archaic de?nition as ?a severe melancholia caused by a protracted absence from home.? The more current meaning given is ?a wistful or excessively sentimental . .. yearning for return to or return of some real or romanticized period or irrecoverable condition or setting in the past.? This nostalgia; this longing for connection that is projected upon falsi?ed images, increasingly replaces what were once natural linkages emerging from an understanding of the progression of experience. The more that the objects of our nostalgia become calculated media com- modities, the further we get from being able to grasp our condition. The yearning itself is authentic, I have no doubt, but as the object and the indulgence are generally false, the process can only be debilitating. Nostalgia, fostered by the products of our popular culture, sets us ever more deeply into a schizophrenic relation to ourselves. When we discharge our pain and sadness at the loss of mean- ingful parts of the past by consuming manufactured images, we break contact with ourselves and with the truth of that past. Such nostalgia short-circuits the mourning process. And where mourning lets us lay the pasr t0 resr and get on with things, the bathos bf nostalgia keeps us floating in a perpetual illusion about an attain- able or renewable past. By immersing ourselves in the afterglow of our own history?the seductive, doctored afterglow?we lose the initiative to keep making history. That is, to perform freely and unself-consciously in the face of the present?" The self-consciousness, which goos hand in hand with the distanced perception of irony, is the most insidious aspect of the nostalgia transacrion. Heightening and sentimentalizing the images allows for safe con- sumption; it shields us from the pain of the genuine. Irony, incorporating the attitude of knowing, of being ?wised-up,? anticipates and preempts true reSponse. We are rendered passive. When Garrison Keillor delivers his Lake Wobegon stories, his tone and arch pauses do the work of distancing. His every vocal gesture is telling us that, hey, this is cute and folksy, that we ought to be comfortably amused by the doings of these dear, benighted small-town folks. What was once in earnest exists now to be chuckled over. The truth has not come closer?it has receded. And when one of the characters on ?thirtysomething? launches into yet another paean to the lost ideals of the sixties, it is always with a grimace that derides the very cliches that are being vented. Again, the matter of the past is hedged around with the quotation marks of our supposed superiority. The net effect is the divestiture of the past: we can't ?nd our way back to it because its soul has been leached away. Prepackaged nostalgia builds easy bridges to what is ?nally a dream about how things were. The more that such bridges are built, and the more that we use them in our daily traffic, the more likely it is that the truth about the past will slip away. That truth is complex and dif?cult. It re?ects to us images of the present that are not always pleasing. It posits the ongoing work of culture as a massive task. Postmodernism, by contrast, offers simple, even inviting, views. \We can venture into a bazaar of images and attitudes that lay no claim on us; its ironies feel cool, fashionable. But until we can break out of the cage we have made for ourselves, those ironies and the self-consciousness that attends them will be our fate. "?One might, of course, uphold the opposite case: that we take our bearings for the future from the fond ideals?and idealizations? of the past; and indeed, that to uphold a sense of purpose a nation must look back upon something brighter and nobler than the history that revisionists would offer us. What could have been more nostalgic, in this sense, than Ronald Reagan?s farewell address to the nation, his invocation ofjohn Winthrop?s ?city upon a bill"? I would not want to argue that we should do away with the heightenings and disrortions that must attend such a vision. But I would point out that even the president?the prince of nostalgia? warned in the same speech against "an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit." Though his exhortation was for all Americans to learn the patriotic facts, he too was aware of the dangers of memory gone awry. The drive to nostalgia must be recognized for what it is, and it must be tempered consistently with the complicated truth. Otherwise we are condemned to keep dreaming. TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2 117 And here is the demonic irony at the root of all others: that the quality we most prize in all of these trumped- up images of the past is the lack of irony and self- consciousness. We long for nothing so much as a time when people did things out of simple necessity and de- sire, when everything was not tainted by self-awareness, when the guy running to meet his girl under the Biltmore clock was not simultaneously watching himself running to meet his girl under the Biltmore clock. Cl WELFARE REFORM (Continued from p. 25) fornia, and so forth) experience lower unemployment rates than do the ?rust bow of the industrial Midwest and the farm states. Furthermore, unemployment rates tend to differ widely even within states. Vigorous pro- motion of workfare may force poor rural families to relocate to urban areas in order to ?nd jobs. Given this situation, welfare reform that promises total self- suf?ciency through full-time employment constitutes a cruel hoax for a majority of recipients. Structural impediments to workfare, imposed by the nature of the marginal labor market in a service economy, present serious problems for the credibility of welfare reform. When people fail to get off welfare completely, or when they return to welfare as their marginal jobs evaporate, they become scapegoats. The economic failure of society is thus transformed into the personal failure of welfare recipients and into the general failure of the welfare state. How much ?refOrm? is in the new welfare reform initiative? The most significant improvements are the extension of child day care and Medicaid for one year after a worker ?nds employment, and the inclusion of two-parent households in the program. These provisions will doubtlessly help parents who are occupationally upwardly mobile; however, the great majority of people on AFDC exhibit a job history in which welfare comple- ments episodic and low-wage employment. In light of this fact, the new welfare reform will extend important bene?ts to the working poor, but it is unlikely to boost people off of welfare by itself. ?Most work-welfare programs look like decent investments, but no carefully evaluated work-welfare programs have done more than put a tiny dent in the welfare caseloads,? observes David Ellwood of Harvard?s Kennedy School of Government. Results of various workfare experiments show that ?annual earnings?are raised $200 to $750,? Ellwood says, hardly enough to launch AFDC families toward ?nancial self-suf?ciency. Unless wages increase and jobs become more reliable, the working poor will continue to need welfare bene?ts. 118 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2 More important, some of the bill?s provisions are clearly punitive and unlikely to enhance substantially the economic independence of those on AFDC. Requir~ ing one parent of two-parent households to hold an unpaid job in exchange for bene?ts probably won?t increase self-suf?ciency, and it may actually impede it if bene?ciaries are forced into these jobs when they could be seeking work in the labor market. Garnishing wages is unlikely to increase economic independence if a parent?s wages are so low that such a requirement creates incentives to quit work in order to avoid paying child support. Finally, reliance on states to operate workfare programs that are not adequately funded is likely to result in welfare reform that is uneven ?-relatively wealthy states, such as Massachusetts and California, will expand on generous workfare programs that are already in place, while poorer states, such as Mississippi and New Mexico, will be hard-pressed to implement programs that are anything more than punitive. All told, the Family Support Act of 1988 is at best a feeble attempt at welfare reform, and at worst harsh and punitive. THE OBSTACLES TO WELFARE REFORM hy, then, was such poor legislation passed in the ?rst place? Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank in Washington, DC, observes that the price tag of a major restructuring of welfare ?moves outside the realm of what can even be discussed in Congress.? Indeed, even groups such as the National Governors? Association and the American Public Welfare Association (APWA), previously enraged by Reagan administration strikes against social programs, backed the Family Support Act. According to APWA staff, the conventional wisdom was that, despite the bill?s ?aws, it was the best that could be gotten at the time. In any case, they contended, what the am lacks in clout, it makes up for in symbolic value. In many ways, the bitter argument that ensued in Congress over the Family Support Act was both the cul- mination of pressure that had been building to repair the alleged damage done by liberal social legislation to the national culture as well as the opening volley in an up- coming battle over more substantial matters?speci?cally the social insurance entitlement programs. After all, AFDC expenditures for 1988 were pegged at $16.5 billion, while the de?cit-reduction target was set at $144 billion. AFDC is small change compared to Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance programs that cost over $300 billion annually and constitute 60 percent of social welfare expenditures. Therefore, the controversy surrounding AFDC is largely symbolic; at the heart of the debate lie questions in-