Co-Agency Node Dossier

Diego Giménez Vila (Daga) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Valencia, Spain. He is the creator of the YouTube channel Indagando, a space in which he shares analyses, reflections, and commentaries on the readings accompanying his process of academic formation and research. His work is characterized by a defense of eclecticism and freedom of thought, understood as fundamental tools against dogmatism and as pathways toward an open-ended search for meaning.

• YouTube: Indagando

• E-mail: [email protected]

Note: This trilogy is extracted from Diego Giménez Vila’s (Daga) master’s thesis. 📄 The original text can be accessed at the following link

PART I: Nostalgia in Late Capitalism

1. Nostalgia: From Pathology to Emotion and Symptom

I, on horseback, beneath its shadow

I searched for my village and my home.

I entered the courtyard that one day

had been a fountain with water.

Although the fountain was no longer there,

the fountain could always be heard.

And the water that no longer flowed

returned to give me water.

— Rafael Alberti¹

Longing has always been present throughout human history. Across different cultures, with different nuances and terms, the act of longing for something or someone is a properly human sentiment within the broad spectrum of emotions.² Nevertheless, we can assert that nostalgia, properly understood, is a relatively recent concept. More precisely, in 1688 the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the neologism “nostalgia” in an attempt to designate an illness that particularly affected soldiers who found themselves far from their homeland. The creation of this concept brings together the Greek words nostos (“return home”) and algia (“pain, suffering”).³ Through this apt terminology, Hofer diagnosed a phenomenon that afflicted people in contexts as specific as exile. Thus, nostalgia initially came to be regarded as an illness that rendered soldiers incapable of remaining fully engaged in battle. Soldiers were forbidden from singing folk songs because of the possibility that they might trigger an outbreak of nostalgia and, consequently, lower the morale of combatants. Nostalgia was regarded as a genuine problem, to the point of producing extreme situations such as the one described by Svetlana Boym:

In 1733, nostalgia had struck the Russian army immediately after entering Germany, and the situation had reached such alarming extremes that the general in command of the troops had been forced to implement a radical treatment in order to combat the virus of nostalgia and had threatened his soldiers with “burying alive the first one who fell ill.”

[…] The punishment was carried out on two or three occasions, and no one else in the Russian army ever complained of nostalgia again.⁴

From the perspective of a contemporary observer, the actions of this general are not merely barbaric and excessive; what is also striking is that the trigger for such an act is, today, regarded as an emotion. It is a clear example of how something that we now consider entirely ordinary could, in its time, shake the society in which it emerged. However, the nostalgia named by Hofer had a remedy: returning to one’s homeland, finding oneself once again at home and with one’s loved ones. The same is not true of contemporary nostalgia, since it is incurable. As Simon Reynolds puts it, “nostalgia, in the modern sense, is an impossible or at least incurable emotion: the only remedy would be time travel.”⁵

The history of nostalgia is complex; today, despite no longer being considered an illness, it remains an ambiguous and conflictual emotion. On the one hand, it is comforting and gratifying, since it returns to us images of that which we once cherished. On the other, it is painful and unsettling, since it gives us back the lost object only to take it away from us like a child’s candy. Thus, we must understand that nostalgia, both then and now, is an object of discussion and inquiry across various disciplines. It is an emotion that leads us from the present toward the past, hypnotically ruminating upon that which once brought us happiness. Nostalgia as an emotion, if it is incurable, is so because it is temporal.⁶ Unlike nostalgia as an illness, which depended upon space —a physical return, a physical place to which one could go back, an actual “return home”— nostalgia as an emotion bitterly knows that nothing will ever be as it once was, that the return to a beloved space is traversed by temporal dissonance. The return would be the virtual recollection⁷ of what once was, but it would not restore the original experience that memory longs for.

Nostalgia, both as it was understood as an illness and as it is understood today, is an intrinsically modern phenomenon. Chronologically and nominally, it emerges within modernity, as we saw in 1688, but its conditions of possibility also make it emerge both as an effect of modernity and as a response to it. As an act of resistance to progress, nostalgia seems to oppose the accelerated pace of change. Beyond being an emotion, whether individual or collective, nostalgia entails a particular power in its way of looking at and reflecting upon time. Boym explains:

The nostalgia that interests me is not simply an individual illness, but a symptom of our era, a historical emotion. It does not necessarily oppose modernity and individual responsibility. Rather, it is contemporary with modernity itself. Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: alter egos. Nostalgia is not merely the expression of a local longing, but the result of a new understanding of time and space that made possible the distinction between “local” and “universal.”⁸

Gradually, this initial approach to nostalgia as an illness began to dissolve. It was during the nineteenth century that certain writers and artists embraced nostalgia and incorporated it into their works, transforming it into a mode of expression and removing it from its restricted domain.⁹ Nostalgia as a modern phenomenon changed its skin; slowly, its meaning shifted, and it progressively came to be understood as an emotion. Part of this process also had to do with its generalization: one no longer needed to be far from home in order to experience it. The rhythms of everyday life, progress, the promise of autonomy, and various social and technological changes gradually made lived experience radically different across generations.¹⁰ Reynolds describes this situation precisely:

Nostalgia for the past also intensified because the world was changing more rapidly. Economic transformations, ideological innovations, and sociocultural changes meant that, for the first time, there were stark differences between the world in which one had grown up and the world in which one grew old. From landscapes dramatically altered by development (“When I was a child, all of this was surrounded by fields”) to new technologies affecting the sensation and rhythm of everyday life, the world in which one felt at home gradually disappeared. The present became a foreign country.¹¹

Thus, nostalgia as an emotion became sedimented while its status as an illness disappeared. Nostalgia ceased to be an isolated phenomenon peculiar to soldiers and became a broadly shared emotion. Relentlessly, our condition as thinking beings makes us conscious of our temporality and our place in the world. In an increasingly frayed and accelerated world, nostalgia becomes universalized as a response to our existential disorientation. We are conscious of the constant transformation of time, tempus fugit, and contemplate what has vanished as a lost treasure.¹²

If nostalgia has grown by leaps and bounds today, it is precisely because the premises of modernity —secularization, progress, technification, autonomy, etc.— and the way of life to which we have become accustomed under late capitalism have expanded exponentially. Modernity and its conditions, rather than curing the illness of nostalgia, aggravate it, though not as a particular illness but as a social symptom. Nostalgia is everywhere; it is increasingly common across different generations and is produced by different causes. Boym states that “progress has not only failed to cure the disease of nostalgia, but has made it worse. […] Inevitably, nostalgia reappears as a defense mechanism in an age of acceleration and historical upheaval.”¹³

Our analysis and approach to understanding this phenomenon is no longer concerned with nostalgia as an illness, but as a social symptom. It is a problematic emotion that —without necessarily being negative—, given its extraordinary frequency today compared with other historical periods, conceals something about our era and our society. It appears to reveal itself as a response to our forms of life within our particular historical context. In some sense, our memories, our most intimate and tender experiences, resurface from their unconscious repression in the face of the threat of uncertainty. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Cecilio Paniagua explains why this is inevitable: our past experiences continue to persist within us and, in some sense, we remain those experiences:

Within the human psyche, it is necessary to understand the phenomenon of the preservation of what is past. The past is not merely a stage that has been overcome: it remains latent in the present. William Faulkner reminded us: The past is not dead; it’s not even past! Indeed, the childhood of human beings literally persists beneath the psychological strata of adolescence and adulthood. This hidden psychic reality, like so many others, seems to have been understood better by poets than by scientists.¹⁴

The “return home” of nostalgia entails a reunion with oneself in the past. The song of nostalgic sirens leads us along paths already traveled, reactualizing what once was present and moving us through the details of our lives. As Grafton Tanner puts it, “nostalgia is one of the ways we have of confronting finitude and assimilating the devastating reality that everything eventually disappears. Places change, faces appear different.”¹⁵ Thus, despite its emotional wear, nostalgia also contains a therapeutic element. Nostalgia helps us remember our identity, gather together the scattered fragments of our lives, and reconstruct our history through those experiences that defined us. In this beautiful passage, Walter Benjamin indicates how our memory can become the archaeological site of our biography:

Anyone attempting to approach their own buried past must behave like an excavator…

They must not fear returning again and again to the same subject… For the subject itself is nothing more than a site, a stratum concealing a treasure buried beneath the earth, accessible only through the most exhaustive examination. This treasure consists of images stripped of all associations, resting —like precious fragments, like busts in a collector’s gallery— within the most prosaic compartments of our later understanding.¹⁶

Thus, nostalgia is an emotion that helps us recompose the fragments of our life history, an archaeology of our existence that allows us to gather the pieces of our identity; nostalgia, in due measure, is healthy and necessary. The problem arises when nostalgia becomes a refuge, a retrotopia.¹⁷ Instead of a site and a source of treasures, it becomes a form of escapism, rather than a means of revisiting what made us who we are. It is in the twentieth century that nostalgia emerges as an established and normalized emotion, and not only that: it also becomes an emotion that popular culture itself nourishes and amplifies. Nostalgia then expands socially in symptomatic fashion through our emotional investments in those cultural products that formed part of our past. In Reynolds’s words:

In the second half of the twentieth century, nostalgia became increasingly bound to pop culture. It was expressed through pop culture (revivals, radio programs bringing back the great hits of the past, reissues et al.) but it was also triggered by the pop culture of our youth: mass-entertainment artifacts such as celebrities from the past and vintage TV programs, quaint commercials and dance crazes that had once caused a sensation, old hits and words that were used in a particular era.¹⁸

Thus, we arrive practically at the present day. We are faced with a problem rooted in our historical context, in which mass culture, capitalism, and technification promote nostalgia both directly and indirectly. In the following section, we shall attempt to place our elusive social context into perspective in order to provide a frame of reference for examining in greater detail the relationship between nostalgia and cultural critique.

2. Cultural Critique and Capitalism

Well-being becomes established in the West and capitalism assumes a hegemonic role; a role that will ultimately prove itself through force following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this liquid society, in constant restructuring of its internal axiomatics, under the pretext of liberal and social-democratic societies, and also in the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control, we see that the reality of our era depends upon a multiplicity of forms that are difficult to conceptualize. The hackneyed concept of postmodernity attempted to do its part by seeking a way to analyze this sociohistorical heterogeneity, an incomplete project, if indeed it was ever a project. Each author has attempted to offer a version of events, an interpretation of the phenomena inscribed within the social reality of our times.¹⁹

In this section, we shall present different perspectives that have marked an era in their attempts to explain what has happened and what continues to happen within these consumerist and hypertechnological societies. We have selected the principal voices that, in our judgment, have made especially crucial contributions to conceptualizing this elusive context. First, we shall draw upon Gilles Lipovetsky’s historical and sociological analysis in order to lay out the central elements that established the consumer society as the prevailing social model. We shall then briefly present the perspectives of Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord, who took up the legacy of the consumer society that emerged between the late 1960s and the 1970s. Subsequently, we shall analyze the concept of postmodernity through Fredric Jameson, arguably its principal theorist, and then briefly examine Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism as a counterpoint to postmodernity. Finally, having sketched a panoramic image of the sociohistorical conjuncture, we shall articulate our own conceptual commitment as a consequence of the conclusions obtained by comparing these different authors.

2.1. Cultural Context and the Integration of Consumer Society as Social Reality

Various cultural and economic transformations became established from the nineteenth century to the present. The capitalist mode of production expanded and increased its investment power and its capacity to transform the everyday lives of individuals, from the organization of labor to forms of interpersonal relations in private life. The first moment of the capitalist phase, as Lipovetsky explains, was characterized by unprecedented growth in the system of goods production:

By increasing the regularity, volume, and speed of transportation to factories and cities, railway networks in particular enabled the formation of large-scale commerce, the regular transportation of massive quantities of products, and the management of flows of products from one stage of production to another.²⁰

This increase in the speed and quantity of goods produced resulted in a vast supply,²¹ and as supply increased, the price of goods progressively declined and became more accessible. At this stage, the business strategy was no longer so much to sell fewer products at a high cost, but rather to sell a large quantity of products with a low profit margin. As Lipovetsky explains:

The consumer economy is inseparable from this marketing invention: the pursuit of profit through volume and the practice of low prices. Making products accessible to the masses: the modern era of consumption entails a project of democratizing access to commercial goods.²²

Thus, the expansion of the capitalist mode of production gradually took root within society, making consumption increasingly widespread. Even so, at that time the model of production and consumption was still becoming established and had not yet generalized across all social strata. Gradually, advertising and marketing transformed the way products and brands were connected to one another: “the buyer will no longer trust the seller, but the brand, since the guarantee and quality of products have been transferred to the manufacturer.”²³ In this transformation, the figure of the modern consumer crystallizes in opposition to that of the traditional customer: brands now appeal directly to consumers, while the seduction of advertising guides them in deciding what to consume.

Thus, the massification of consumer society, as we know it today, did not occur until the second phase of capitalism identified by Lipovetsky in the 1950s. This phase universalized consumption across all social classes; consumption had now become mass consumption and consequently gave rise to the so-called “society of abundance.” This new moment of capitalism was produced principally by increased productivity combined with rising wages, and this relationship resulted in increased consumption across all social strata. During this second phase, the democratization of consumption was joined by the invention and widespread access to television, household appliances, automobiles, etc.,²⁴ producing a series of social and cultural transformations that shattered earlier lifestyles. We find ourselves within a social panorama in which consumption is equated with happiness, GDP with quality of life, and everything revolves around the maximization of comfort and access to new goods and forms of consumption. Yet the phenomenon cannot be reduced to these matters alone. Lipovetsky illustrates certain beliefs characteristic of this period:

The climate of stimulation of desires, advertising euphoria, the exuberant image of holidays, the sexualization of signs and bodies. It is a type of society in which seduction replaces coercion, hedonism replaces duty, spending replaces saving, humor replaces solemnity, liberation replaces repression, and the present replaces promises of the future.²⁵

Thus, we find ourselves before a historical moment that, within a matter of decades, radically transformed its way of life, aspirations, and values.²⁶ Lipovetsky offers an extensive retrospective of how these changes became sedimented. Baudrillard, however, in 1970, in his work The Consumer Society, would analyze the social context we are describing from within the historical conjuncture itself.

Baudrillard’s analysis seeks to understand the reality of consumer society through the structuralist tradition. His sociological approach attempts to explain how consumption is not satisfied through the acquisition of the desired object, but rather how consumption itself is understood as a form of social differentiation and obeys a system of needs grounded in the system of production.²⁷ Just as Veblen spoke of positional goods as those goods acquired in order to demonstrate the social status of those who possess them, Baudrillard understands the logic of consumption as a logic of the differentiation of signs, a means of distinguishing oneself from and communicating with other members of society. Within a social reality coded by signs, reality becomes a space in which signs overlap with the world, and one cannot escape this internal logic of capitalist production. Consumption, before being the consumption of objects, is the consumption of signs. If Marxist categories emphasized use-value and exchange-value, Baudrillard would propose a third category adapted to consumer society: sign-value. This concept points toward the symbolic structure underlying the cultural products we consume, understanding that what constitutes a cultural product is not merely its function and monetary value, but also the symbolic value it socially represents. In Baudrillard’s words:

Outside the field of its objective function, where it cannot be replaced, outside the field of its denotation, the object becomes more or less indefinitely substitutable within the field of connotations, where it acquires sign-value. Thus, the washing machine serves as an appliance and represents an element of comfort, prestige, etc. The field of consumption is precisely the latter. Within it, all kinds of different objects can replace the washing machine as a meaningful element. In the logic of signs, as in that of symbols, objects are no longer linked at all to a defined function or need. Precisely because they respond to something quite different, namely either social logic or the logic of desire, for which they operate as a mobile and unconscious field of signification.²⁸

Baudrillard appeals to a logic of consumption that is not restricted to the mere act of consuming; rather, he also recognizes consumption as a language and therefore as a system of coding through which we communicate. Consumption is not confined solely to social prestige and the function of the product; above all, it consists of codes of signs transmitted between individuals. Within this framework of social differentiation, each individual becomes unique by differentiating themselves through products: they construct a concrete image through their consumption choices. Yet products are not made to fit people; rather, people adjust themselves to the idea conveyed by products and, by consuming them, distinguish themselves from other users through their particular sign-value: “what seals the integration of the group is the exchange of differences.”²⁹

In this context, television constituted a social revolution that transformed the ways of entertaining oneself and interpreting the world. Marshall McLuhan would formulate the familiar phrase “the medium is the message,” a cryptic expression that reveals something valuable about the way in which we interact with the mass media.³⁰ Baudrillard analyzes the implications of this phrase: in a world in which every family receives its information through television, the form of what is said modifies its content to the point that it becomes amplified, distorted, fragmented, and disseminated. Everyone now has access to this medium, and social reality therefore feeds back upon itself through the inscription of images and signs in order to reproduce and transmit them. The real value of events is replaced by selected images and information that are reworked as media messages. Baudrillard’s point is that, in such a context, the content is not the message, but rather the consequences produced by the determinations imposed by the medium. Baudrillard writes:

Just as the “message” of the railway is neither the coal nor the passengers it transports, but rather a vision of the world, a new character of agglomerations, the “message” of television is not the images it transmits, but the new modes of relation and perception it imposes, the transformation of the traditional structures of the family and the group. Going even further, in the case of television and modern mass media, what one receives, assimilates, “consumes,” is not so much this or that spectacle as the virtuality of all spectacles.³¹

Thus, Baudrillard’s point in reflecting upon McLuhan’s phrase is not so much the absorption of events into signs —although that is certainly part of it— but rather the way in which social reality is altered, causing the logic of consumption to spread through this mass transmission and communication of signs. Now everything real is permeated by the symbolic; the logic of consumption and the commodity has conquered every corner, leaving no possibility for anything else: all that remains is the immanence of the system of signs. Baudrillard states:

The logic of the commodity has become generalized and today governs not only the labor process and material products, but also culture as a whole, sexuality, human relations, even individual fantasies and drives. This logic encompasses everything, not only in the sense that all functions and all needs are objectified and manipulated for profit, but also in the deeper sense that everything becomes spectacle, that is, everything is presented, evoked, orchestrated in images, signs, and consumable models.³²

Within this historical context, everything is mediated by signs and spectacle. Baudrillard would draw upon certain aspects of Guy Debord, an author who, from a neo-Marxist perspective, would fiercely criticize the economic and social system of his time. For Debord, spectacle is understood as the ominous form assumed by contemporary societies. Reality, dependent upon the capitalist mode of production, becomes spectacle insofar as social reality is dominated by advertising, propaganda, entertainment, and so forth. Everything is mediated by representation; things, in their spectacular form, are presented as mere scenery yet taken as real. Thus, according to Debord, the development of capitalism has ultimately placed appearance above being. He expresses it as follows:

The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life had entailed, in the definition of every human realization, an evident degradation of being into having. The present phase, in which social life is totally occupied by the accumulated results of the economy, leads to a generalized slippage from having to appearing, where every effective “having” must derive its immediate prestige and ultimate function.³³

Thus, Debord criticizes this degradation and rejects the necessity of appearance inscribed within the logic of consumption. For him, the commodity is a fatal evil; its presence leads us toward the pathological logic of consumption and spectacle: panem et circenses. From the moment the commodity has occupied the whole of social life, spectacle appears as the inevitable effect of our culture. As a more mature Baudrillard would demonstrate, signs have ultimately been placed before the real; things, mediated through their appearance, are identified by what has been socially coded within them. The real becomes opaque, and only the symbolic acquires the power of signification: “the real will never again have a chance to occur.”³⁴

2.2. Postmodernity³⁵: Its Problematic Identity and Difficult Status

One would have thought that the world of headphones and Andy Warhol, fundamentalism and AIDS, exercise machines and MTV, yuppies and books on postmodernism, punk hairstyles and crew cuts in the style of the 1950s, the “loss of historicity” and the éloge of schizophrenia, the media and obsessions with calcium and cholesterol, the logic of the “shock of the future” and the emergence of scientists and counterinsurgent forces as new types of social groups would fulfill all the requirements for appearing thoroughly decadent in the eyes of any sensible Martian observer.³⁶

— Fredric Jameson

Against the backdrop of the ideas presented above, the concept of postmodernity emerges as a difficult yet illuminating way of understanding this highly unstable statu quo. Different authors have theorized, subscribed to, and been categorized under the heading of postmodernity. However, this label is problematic because of the multiplicity of its meanings and the heterogeneity of what it designates. Fredric Jameson is probably the thinker who has reflected most rigorously upon the phenomenon of postmodernity. With the intention of presenting a comprehensive image of the concept, we shall investigate certain key ideas of postmodernity through the Jamesonian perspective, which allows us to elucidate this phenomenon with greater clarity.

Reflecting upon these questions will allow us to better understand our historical context and subsequently deepen our inquiry into the problem of nostalgia and its reverberations within liminal spaces.

First, the inherent complexity of analyzing postmodernity lies in the lack of consensus regarding its form and content. One element that has remained latent within the concept of postmodernity is the attempt to historically capture a specific period. Yet the event designated by the prefix “post-” in postmodernity is an “after”; nevertheless, it remains unclear whether postmodernity constitutes a culmination of modernity or a rupture with it. It appears to be a historical conjuncture that differentiates itself from other moments, as though it represented an overcoming of something. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what boundary has been crossed and what determines this presumed structural transformation.

Jameson analyzes the underlying problem of postmodernity as the search for change emerging from within itself. There is a conceptual intention to designate a change in the face of the continuous fragmentation of events; it would seem that postmodernity is a time in the sense of a climate rather than a time in the chronological sense. Its attempt to grasp events responds to an effort to capture continuous transformations rather than to identify a culminating moment that divides history into a “before and after.” Jameson states that the theory of postmodernism is “the effort to measure the temperature of the age without the necessary instruments, and in a situation in which we are not even sure anymore that there is such a thing as an ‘age,’ or Zeitgeist, or ‘system’ or ‘current situation.’”³⁷

Thus, postmodernity attempts to diagnose the sociohistorical atmosphere in which we live; it is an attempt to understand a reality traversed by a conflicted temporality. Ultimately, this crisis of historicity is related to the fragmentation of events: space has subsumed time by interconnecting everything under a single logic, that of advanced capitalism.³⁸ The rules of the game remain the same, and this process, far from unifying events and providing them with a coherent narrative, instead fragments reality into a collection of pieces mixed together and united within a global economic framework. The experience of individuals under postmodernity has lost a structural narrative capable of holding it together; it is precisely the act of holding itself together that permits the multiplicity of heterogeneous narratives. Jameson comments on this problem concerning the experience of the subject:

The subject has lost the capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the variety of temporal experience and to organize its past and future into a coherent experience; it then becomes difficult to imagine how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything other than “heaps of fragments” and in the practice of fortuitous heterogeneity, the fragmentary and the random.³⁹

Thus, the temporal distortion of postmodernity could be described as a chaosmos, following Félix Guattari’s concept: a sort of ordered chaotic interaction that displays characteristics of both poles and that, at the same time, can hardly be isolated systematically. The mode of being of postmodernity is asystematic, and it is precisely for this reason that attempts to bind it through schemes and patterns prove difficult. Nevertheless, as Jameson points out, the core of postmodernity lies in the fact that it refers to a statu quo dominated by late capitalism.⁴⁰ From this it follows that postmodernity, whatever it may be, will always be an advanced state of the capitalist system and, in its epochal climate, establishes itself as the cultural pattern of this stage of capitalism. It is not an entirely new phenomenon but rather an updating and subsequent modification of earlier phases. On this point, Jameson criticizes the Adamic necessity to conceptualize every moment as though each change implied a historically radical transformation; it would seem that this very impulse is itself a symptom of postmodernity. Jameson explains:

The frenzy with which practically anything in the present is invoked as evidence of its uniqueness and of its radical difference from earlier moments of human time in fact strikes one as if it housed a distinctly self-referential pathology, as though our total forgetting of the past had been consumed in the vacant yet hypnotized contemplation of a schizophrenic present that is, by definition, virtually incomparable.⁴¹

Thus, it would seem that every cultural change, every technological advance, or every unprecedented phenomenon must generate a transformation in the formal structure through which we refer to reality. Yet postmodernity would conceptually incorporate precisely the need to have this necessity. Postmodernity subsumes the tone of the era and, through its ambiguous yet expansive character, encompasses the diversity of phenomena that other categories —postindustrial society, consumer society, globalization, etc.— perhaps restrict to a specific field. In this way, beyond its intrinsic difficulties, postmodernity tends toward a generality that allows it to encompass more domains of reality under its porous meaning. Jameson states:

“Postmodern,” however, seems to have embraced the appropriate areas of everyday life or the quotidian; its cultural resonance, appropriately broader than the merely aesthetic or artistic, conveniently distracts from the economic while permitting the cataloguing of newer economic innovations and materials under the new heading.⁴²

Having said this about its semantic complications and its conflicted historical status, the concept of postmodernity would seek to bring together the various series of elements generated within and by late capitalism, subsuming them within its heteroclite capacity to organize and culturally expand its own axiomatics.⁴³ Consequently, we believe that —as Jameson expresses it in the title of his work— the clearest and most synthetic definition of the phenomenon of postmodernity would be to understand it as “the cultural logic of advanced capitalism.”⁴⁴ Thus, we must understand postmodernity through the dialectical tension between the processes of late capitalism and their effects upon culture, without attributing exclusive primacy to either side. Jameson himself responds to a criticism based upon this assumption:

Featherstone thinks that my use of the term “postmodernism” belongs to a specifically cultural category. This is not the case and, for better or worse, it is designed to name a “mode of production” in which cultural production finds a specific functional place and whose symptomatology proceeds above all from culture in my work.⁴⁵

Consequently, Featherstone’s criticism assumes that Jameson seeks to reduce postmodernity to a cultural category; however, as Jameson indicates, “the cultural” is only one part of the equation. Postmodernity would be the cultural “mode of production,” but this mode of production —a Marxist term chosen deliberately— in turn obeys a capitalist structure that produces a cultural milieu generating specific social, economic, and political effects. It is precisely this problem concerning culture and capitalism that generates the postmodern context.

Another aspect to which Jameson points in characterizing postmodernity is the understanding of it as the culmination of the hegemony of culture over nature. From this perspective, we can observe how culture has subjected nature, causing culture itself to become established as a “second nature.”⁴⁶ As a consequence, culture has tended toward the aestheticization of the world; this fixation permeates every area of the social field. Through the production and consumption of tangible and intangible goods, our ways of relating to one another are dominated by the aestheticized appearance of things; their sensory impact seduces us. In this regard, Gianni Vattimo argues that the aestheticization of the world entails the end of art:⁴⁷

The death of art means two things: in a strong and utopian sense, the end of art as a specific fact separated from the rest of experience within a redeemed and reintegrated existence; in a weak or real sense, aestheticization as an extension of the domain of the mass media.⁴⁸

The sacred character of art becomes profane, and the aestheticization of the world appears to dissolve the boundaries of the artistic and merge them with industrial design and advertising. Beyond these effects of dissolution or dissociation between the aesthetic and the artistic, the point is that the origin of aestheticization lies in the commodification of the world. This brings us back to Debord’s discussion of the commodity and spectacle: art is now entertainment, and entertainment is a form of commodity. This also radically affects our conception of art: during modernity, there was a profound separation between high and low culture.⁴⁹ By contrast, under postmodernity these barriers appear to have dissolved. Classical music can be heard playing in an elevator, while any scholar can purge their ailments with a healthy dose of trash television. In this sense, liminal spaces —the artistic phenomenon we shall examine in the second part of the essay— reflect how contemporary art is immersed within and determined by this conjuncture.

In this respect, we see how culture has become commodity and commodity has become culture. In contrast to modernity, under postmodernity the sphere of the market has expanded to such an extent that it has virtually territorialized every part of reality, reaching even the most unexpected corners of culture. In Jameson’s words:

In postmodern culture, “culture” has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself, and is a commodity in the same measure as are the things it contains: modernism was still, minimally and tangentially, a critique of the commodity and an attempt to make it transcend itself. Postmodernism is the consumption of pure commodification as process.⁵⁰

Once these ideas have been outlined, we can recognize, in the analysis we have developed, a series of facts and characteristics associated with the so-called “postmodernity.” This does not mean that we can rest entirely at ease, since we may fall into the use of the concept as a convenient catch-all reference capable of justifying and correlating everything that happens. Jameson himself, in his attempt to clarify and refine the concept of postmodernity, warned that attempting to understand it also means inevitably engaging with certain paradoxes. On the one hand, it involves systematizing an asystematic concept and, on the other, tracing historicity within an ahistorical concept.⁵¹ Thus, we must remain constantly aware of the difficulty presented by the concept of postmodernity. Inevitably, in its irresolvable multivocity, the concept refers to a social reality; therefore, we must exercise caution with it without categorically rejecting its use. Jameson states:

For better or worse, we cannot “not” use it. But it must be understood that my argument implies that every time it is used, we are under an obligation to rehearse the internal contradictions and to stage these inconsistencies and these dilemmas of representation; we have to work through all of that at once. “Postmodernism” is not something that we can resolve once and for all and then use with a clear conscience. The concept, if there is one, has to come at the end of our debates, and not at the beginning.⁵²

When speaking of postmodernity, it is inevitable that the concept itself should instill in the reader an interpretive obscurity that is difficult to dispel, since this complication is constitutive of the way in which it is represented. A substantial alternative to the concept of postmodernity was proposed by the philosopher Mark Fisher in 2009 under the name “capitalist realism.” This other concept, emerging after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the economic crisis of 2008, incorporates certain ideas that respond to the “totalizing” aspirations of the concept of postmodernity. We turn to Fisher’s concept rather than those of other authors because, fundamentally, the reception and motivation underlying Fisher’s capitalist realism encompass a period subsequent to what is strictly postmodern and consciously seek to move beyond it. Thus, capitalist realism incorporates certain key ideas that extend beyond the decades that gave rise to the concept of postmodernity. As Fisher explains, the concept of postmodernity is valid and performs a function similar in some respects to that of capitalist realism. Nevertheless, its form does not entirely correspond to the problem it seeks to update. Fisher himself argues concerning Jameson:

What I call capitalist realism could indeed be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism and postmodernity as theorized by Jameson. And yet, despite Jameson’s enormous and illuminating achievement, the concept of postmodernism remains debatable; its meanings, appropriate and useless at the same time, are multiple and fluctuating. I would even argue that some of the processes described and analyzed by Jameson became aggravated and chronic in such a way that they also underwent a kind of change in nature.⁵³

Fisher rejects the concept of postmodernity in favor of capitalist realism for three principal reasons. First, the idea of capitalist realism presupposes the collapse of the Soviet bloc and its ideological consequences on a global scale. The capitalist model, as Fukuyama argued with greater or lesser accuracy, establishes itself as the only alternative. Any other alternative is regarded as undesirable, since “actually existing socialism,” as Fisher explains, has already demonstrated its historical trajectory. Now there is no real or nominal alternative to capitalism: “what we are confronted with now, instead, is a more generalized and deeper sense of exhaustion and political sterility.”⁵⁴ Second, Fisher argues that Jameson constantly establishes a contrast between modernity and postmodernity. The manner in which social reality is structured is set against the impasse with modernity, as two moments characterized by different values and modes of relation.

In this regard, Fisher argues that capitalist realism no longer presents this kind of confrontation with the modern. On the contrary, “the triumph over modernism is taken for granted: modernism has really become something that can return periodically as a frozen aesthetic style, though no longer as an ideal of life.”⁵⁵ Third and finally, Fisher assumes that the horizon within which capitalism is now situated stands open and victorious on its own terms. The generations born since the 1990s have grown up without a genuinely viable alternative within their imaginary. This reality is assumed as given and preferable in the absence of alternatives: “One way of understanding capitalist realism in what is especially realistic about it is through its presumption that we no longer believe in the Big Other.”⁵⁶ The concept of capitalist realism is established insofar as no different form of socioeconomic organization can be imagined; capitalism permeates every layer of reality and, in turn, this fact is normalized through the apparent naturalness of its assumption.

Without entering into greater detail regarding Fisher’s interpretation and his ideas surrounding “capitalist realism,” we have presented it here as a critique and updating of the concept of postmodernity. At this point, we believe that the reach of the different voices we have presented, and their different ways of referring to a dense and constitutively dynamic social conjuncture, provide us with grounds for organizing the philosophical consequences yielded by this panorama. Having said this, let us proceed to identify the ideas we wish to retain for our research.

2.3. Theoretical Commitment to the Concept of “Late Capitalism”

Following the journey we have undertaken through different authors, concepts, and perspectives, we now find ourselves in the position of reorganizing and filtering all the positions presented above. As we have said, each interpretation captures a series of elements and highlights certain motives that do not appear in others. Thus, we can now incorporate certain points that we consider indispensable in order to emphasize the concept or form that we find most satisfactory to employ in this research.

First of all, we wish to clearly state our commitment to the concept of “late capitalism.” This decision is based upon several reasons. Above all, this concept is capable of grasping in a more neutral manner everything contained within its analogous forms. One of the problems with speaking of postmodernity, the society of the spectacle, consumer society, etc., is the theoretical commitment that unfolds from the premises upon which the author constructs their theory. For example, Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism is highly accurate in certain respects and fruitful for understanding the contemporary political-economic panorama. However, its commitment also entails a series of ideological struggles that we have no intention of taking upon ourselves. Thus, throughout this research we shall attempt to remain as aseptic as possible in our relationship with capitalism as a complex concept and with the effects that unfold from this socioeconomic system.

In this way, the different concepts we have analyzed refer to a series of aspects of great interest, but in their attempt to systematize they overlook or neglect other questions. Thus, precisely because we wish to undertake as broad and fruitful a retrospective as possible, our review of the different authors and interpretations seeks to understand the different questions at stake. Likewise, the concept of postmodernity, while legitimate and highly useful as an attempt to understand social reality, suffers, in our view, from an excessively ubiquitous semantic generality —in addition to the poor reputation often associated with a presumed “relativism” and “nihilism”— which, at bottom, rather than being the origin, is the symptom of its own condition. By contrast, all the other concepts are exceedingly specific: they point toward a particular motivation, a restricted sector, and, at times, clearly defined struggles through their use.

For the reasons given above, the concept of “late capitalism” still retains an air of sincerity and precision regarding what it designates. Despite being a long-established concept, as Jameson points out, “the general use of the term ‘advanced capitalism’ has its origins in the Frankfurt School; it appears everywhere in Adorno and Horkheimer.”⁵⁷⁵⁸ It seems that this concept does not age, since capitalism is never late enough or advanced enough to mutate into something else. Late capitalism appears to move within the tension between its always-advanced state and a post-capitalism that —in practice— is nonexistent.

Thus, we can conceive of no better concept than late capitalism for designating this state of constant renewal and self-reactualization within a perpetually advanced stage. As Deleuze and Guattari aptly noted in A Thousand Plateaus, “universal capitalism in itself does not exist; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations; by its very nature it is always neocapitalism.”⁵⁹ Thus, capitalism is late because it is always neocapitalism, always modified and updated.

It should also be noted that the way in which Jameson understands postmodernity as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” seems to us an appropriate way of formally expressing the idea underlying the historical context we have identified. Although apparently contradictory, this way of understanding the object of analysis is satisfactory to us, and we shall embrace it throughout the research, despite not adopting the concept of postmodernity for the reasons previously stated. We believe that the concept of “postmodernity” refers to a series of instances that are too vaporous, whereas speaking of “the cultural logic of late capitalism” appears to specify certain formal features that make it possible to discern its application across different spheres.

Ultimately, the concept of late capitalism and its extension conceived as cultural logic is highly satisfactory to us insofar as it articulates different fields. All of this without intending to commit ourselves ideologically to any particular position. Consequently, now that we have delimited the range of action of the terrain we are going to examine, we can analyze how the cultural logic of late capitalism gives rise, directly and indirectly, to nostalgic effects. In this way, we shall also clear the path for presenting, in the second section, the nostalgic effects that unfold culturally within the artistic practices of our historical conjuncture.

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