MEMORY, NOSTALGIA AND „THE END OF UTOPIA” IN THE AGE OF „PRESENTISM” / MÉMOIRE, NOSTALGIE ET « LA FIN DE L’UTOPIE » À L’ÂGE DU « PRÉSENTISME »
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24193/subbeuropaea.2023.2.07Keywords:
presentism, multidirectional memory, nostalgia, retrospective utopia, retrotopiaAbstract
Less than a decade after the proclamation of “the end of history”, the anxieties about “the end of utopia” are gaining ground in the intellectual field all over the world, in the context of both “the crisis of the future” and the haunting of the present by the painful pasts. The latter two are the main consequences of the fracture in the contemporary temporal order – occurred in the ‘70s and deepened after the fall of the Iron Curtain – which defines the “presentist regime of historicity”. These dynamics are counterbalanced, in the same period, by a “global epidemic of nostalgia”, including the commodified forms of “retromania”, that reveals the presentist “faces of utopianism”, from the non-instrumental “retrospective utopias” – as poles of “existential” types of reflective nostalgic practices – to the instrumental “retrotopias” based on the “restorative nostalgia”, which were mobillized in the contemporary memory wars, starting from the ‘80s. Reflecting the tensions between the fixation on the traumatic legacy of the “age of extremes” and the apprehensions about “the future of nostalgia”, the presentist dynamics of multidirectional memory discloses conflictual landscapes (social, cultural, and political), from the mnemonic turn of the ’70s and the ‘80s – which has arisen against the background of the decline of both welfare state and the nation-states, and of the global economic crisis – to the post–Cold War contests around “the divised memories” of “Europe’s Europes”, coexisting with the clashes of contradictory “faces” of nostalgia and utopia.
References
Angé, Olivia; Berliner, David (2016), “Introduction. Anthropology of Nostalgia – Anthropology as Nostalgia”, in Angé, Olivia; Berliner, David (éds.), Anthropology and nostalgia, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1-15.
Appadurai, Arjun (1996), Modernity at Large, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Assmann, Jan (1997), Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt (2007a), Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt (2007b), Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Zigmunt (2017), Retrotopia, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bergmann, Eirikur (2018), Conspiracy & Populism: The Politics of Misinformation, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boym, Svetlana (2001), The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books.
Cento Bull, Anna; Hansen, Hans Lauge; Colom-González, Francisco (2021), “Agonistic Memory Revisited”, in Berger, Stefan; Kansteiner, Wulf (éds.), Agonistic Memory and the Legacy of 20th Century Wars in Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 13-38.
Fukuyama, Francis (1992), The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony (1998), “The Politics of Risk Society”, in Giddens, Anthony; Pierson, Christopher, Conversations with Anthony Giddens. Making Sense of Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 204-217.
Habermas, Jürgen (1991), “The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies”, in Habermas, Jürgen, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 48-70.
Hartog, François (2015 [2003]), Regimes of historicity: presentism and experiences of time. Translated by Saskia Brown, New York: Columbia University Press.
Hirsch, Marianne (2008), “The Generation of Postmemory” in Poetics Today, no. 29 (1): 103-128.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1983), “Introduction: Inventing Traditions”, in Hobsbawm, Eric; Ranger, Terence (éds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-14.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1995), Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London: Abacus.
Hoskins, Andrew; Shchelin, Pavel (2022), “The War Feed: Digital War in Plain Sight” in American Behavioral Scientist, no. 67 (3): 1-15.
Huyssen, Andreas (2000), “Present pasts: media, politics, amnesia” in Public Culture, no. 12: 21-38.
Iorga, Alina (2022), « Passés troublés, retro-utopies et mobilisations guerrières en Europe contemporaine » in Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai. Studia Europaea, no. 2: 155-181.
Iorga, Alina (2023), “1989: « réfolutions », « renaissances » et la crise des utopies” in Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai. Studia Europaea, no. 1: 217-245.
Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (2006), “‘The Activating Presence’ – What Prospects of Utopia in Times of Uncertainty?” in Polish Sociological Review, no. 3 (155): 337-335.
Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (2020), “In times of nostalgia: the brave new world of a grand old emotion”, in Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (éd.), Nostalgia Now: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present, London: Routledge, 1-28.
Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (2021a), “Introduction: The Many Different Faces of Nostalgia – Exploring a Multifaceted and Multidisciplinary Emotion”, in Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (éd.), Intimations of Nostalgia. Multidisciplinary Explorations of an Enduring Emotion, Bristol: Bristol University Press, 1-30.
Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (2021b), “Fear and retrotopia – Critical reflections on the rise of defensive emotions in liquid modernity” in Zoon Politikon, no. 12: 94-124.
Jacoby, Russell (1999), The End of Utopia. Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, New York : Basic Books.
Karlsson, Klas-Göran (2010), “The Uses of History and the Third Wave of Europeanisation”, in Pakier, Małgorzata; Stråth Bo (éds.), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 38-55.
Keightley, Emily; Pickering, Michael (2012), The Mnemonic Imagination. Remembering as Creative Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kołakowski, Leszek (1983), “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered”, in M. McMurrin, Sterling (éd.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values IV, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 229-247.
Koleva, Daniela (2022), Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past. Public Narratives and Personal Recollections, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Koselleck, Reinhart (2004 [1985]), Futures past: on the semantics of historical time. Translated and with an introduction by Keith Tribe, New York: Columbia University Press.
Kotkin, Stephen (2001), Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kubik, Jan; Bernhard, Michael (2014), “A Theory of the Politics of Memory”, in Bernhard, Michael; Kubik, Jan (éds.), Twenty Years after Communism. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration, New York: Oxford University Press, 7-34.
Levitas, Ruth (2010 [1990]), The Concept of Utopia, Bern: Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers.
Levitas, Ruth (2013), Utopia as Method. The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lowenthal, David (1985), The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mannheim, Karl (1956 [1929]), Idéologie et utopie (Une introduction à la sociologie de la connaissance), Paris : Librairie Marcel Rivière et Cie.
Margalit, Avishai (2004 [2002]), The ethics of memory, Cambridge MA & London: Harvard University Press.
Misztal, Barbara A. (1996), Trust in modern societies: the search for the bases of social order, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Mişcoiu, Sergiu (2012), Au pouvoir par le ‘Peuple’. Le populisme saisi par la théorie du discours, Paris: L’Harmattan.
Mouffe, Chantal (2013), Agonistics. Thinking the World Politically, London and New York: Verso.
Nadkarni, Maya; Shevchenko, Olga (2016), “The politics of nostalgia in the aftermath of socialism’s collapse. A case for comparative analysis”, in Angé, Olivia; Berliner, David (éds.), Anthropology and nostalgia, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 61–95.
Olick, Jeffrey K. (2007), The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility, New York & London: Routledge.
Pakier, Małgorzata; Stråth Bo (2010), “Introduction. A European Memory?”, in Pakier, Małgorzata; Stråth, Bo (éds.), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1-20.
Pickering, Michael; Keightley, Emily (2006), “The modalities of nostalgia” in Current Sociology, no. 54 (6): 919–941.
Ricœur, Paul (1984), « L’idéologie et l’utopie: deux expressions de l’imaginaire social » in Autres Temps. Les cahiers du christianisme social, no. 2: 53-64.
Ricoeur, Paul (1986), Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, New York & Guildford: Columbia University Press.
Rigney, Ann (2018), “Remembering Hope: Transnational activism beyond the traumatic” in Memory Studies, no. 11 (3): 368-380.
Rothberg, Michael (2009), Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rothberg, Michael (2019), The implicated subject: beyond victims and perpetrators, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Salmose, Niklas (2019), “Nostalgia Makes Us All Tick: A Special Issue on Contemporary Nostalgia” in Humanities, no. 8 (3): 144.
Sargent, Lyman Tower (2005), « Pour une défense de l’utopie », in Diogène, no. 1 (209): 10-17.
Scribner, Charity (2003), Requiem for communism, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Stewart, Kathleen (1988), “Nostalgia – A Polemic” in Cultural Anthropology, no. 3 (3): 227-241.
Tamm, Marek (2015), “Introduction: Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory”, in Tamm, Marek (éd.), Afterlives of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–23.
Traverso, Enzo (2016), Left-wing melancholia: Marxism, history and memory, New York: Columbia University Press.
Velikonja, Mitja (2008), Titostalgia – A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz, Skopje: Mirovni Inštitut.
Velikonja, Mitja (2009), “Lost in transition: Nostalgia for socialism in post-socialist countries” in East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures, no. 23 (4): 535–551.
Wodak, Ruth (2021), The Politics of Fear. The Shameless Normalization of Far-right Discourse. Second edition, London: Sage.
Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques (1979), L’utopie ou la crise de l’imaginaire, Paris: Editions Universitaires.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Europaea
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
