The Foreclosure of Mnemonic Imagining

Abstract

In the last two chapters we have been discussing the relations between processes of social remembering involving individual participants and the public and popular forms of representing the past that are common in contemporary societies. Nostalgia as a mnemonic field grants us the opportunity to do so because it shows how individual remembering, when catalysed around the composite sense of loss, lack and longing, is embedded in broader social narratives concerned with past times and present times, with what has been gained and what has been sacrificed that should have been saved. Nostalgic remembering can involve feeling the absent presence of what has been lost in an acute and reflexive manner, and when the mnemonic imagination is able to move actively between its three components, this can be turned to critical account in relation to present times. It may foster the appropriate impetus for creative renewal by the way past cultural elements are drawn upon and reworked. When such impetus is felt, what arises from the interactions of loss, lack and longing is a different sense of possibility, one which is formed around what could be done differently, but in light of what has been done before. The legacy of past deeds, practices or values is then seen as a social resource which is important not just because it ensures continuity across time, but also because it can reorient us in the present, provide a new set of directions for moving forwards, and so help shape the future.