Episode 05 - How Nostalgia Shapes Identity

Transcript

Ellie: 0:00

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:01

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:05

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:06

who who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:08

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:11

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. In the wake of the 2020 elections, a lot of Trump supporters, the infamous F your feelings crowd, appears to be having a lot of feelings, and one of the main feelings that I'm seeing on social media, and also on the news, is nostalgia: nostalgia for something that they feel they've lost, that they want to recuperate and that they feel they will no longer get to recuperate now that Trump has not been elected. And they're wallowing in this feeling and trying to mobilize it politically.

Ellie: 0:51

And I'm also hearing a lot of nostalgia from liberals So for instance I've been seeing these memes like 'Do we have a backup of the U.S. from 2016 that we can restore?" This desire to pretend like the last four years hasn't happened and go back to a past where we were focused on brunch, on hanging out, on having fun, and didn't have to worry about the political seeping into our everyday lives. And then I'm seeing a little leftist contingent that is rejecting nostalgia altogether, and saying there is no way we can afford to forget the past four years, we instead have to take up what the past four years have been and what they have put on display in American culture and let go of our nostalgia for the past.

David: 1:35

Nostalgia is a complicated emotion. It's hard to define and it's hard to talk about.

Ellie: 1:40

I think it really is a double-edged sword. There are some wonderful things about nostalgia. As we'll see in the episode today, it helps us crystallize our identity and figure out who we are in relation to our past. But it also has this negative side which is a kind of indifference toward the future and/or what some called Golden Age Syndrome, this desire to go back to a mythical past that doesn't exist any longer and probably never existed at all.

David: 2:06

One of the most powerful depictions of nostalgia is given in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Ellie: 2:12

Perhaps the most famous passage of this multi-volume work comes at the beginning of the first volume, where the protagonist tastes a madeleine, a delicious butter cookie from France.

David: 2:24

They are delicious!

Ellie: 2:26

They are so good. And he dips it into some tea and is instantly transported back to his childhood with memories of eating madeleines with his aunt:

" In Search of Lost Time audio: 2:36

No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, it's disasters innocuous, it's brevity illusory, this new sensation having had on me the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind."

David: 3:35

One of the things, Ellie, that I find really interesting about this pristine account of remembrance is the way in which Proust anchors his account in the senses, especially in the experience of taste, and the reason that I find this interesting because one of the things that differentiates nostalgia from more traditional acts of recollection, where you just remember something that happened in the past, is that nostalgia really transports you and it immerses your senses in a scene from a past that no longer is.

Ellie: 4:07

Yeah! When I think about my experience of nostalgia, it's often wrapped up in tastes, in songs, in smells. I remember as a young adult, I would keep the last bit of a bottle of say, shampoo or perfume that I had so I could go back and have this little catalog of sense. So I had the shampoo that I used when I was studying abroad in Paris, for instance, I would smell it and instantly be transported, maybe an old perfume that I'd worn during a certain relationship. Tragically, I went back to my childhood home a few years later and my dad had just thrown all the bottles away. Understandably, they were near empty bottles of a bunch of random stuff but I think that's been a big part of the experience of nostalgia, for me, is scents. I wish that I could have a catalog of these scents of my life.

David: 4:54

Another thing that has been very prominent in my experiences of nostalgia is the fact that nostalgia is completely outside of your control. So you don't choose to be nostalgic, you're taken over by nostalgia against your will. And so I remember my first time going back to Mexico after having immigrated to the United States, when I was eating tacos from a corner stand and I had this very intense experience where I felt nostalgic, as an immigrant, for having left this country of mine. And it all came when I took a bite of a piece of pineapple that sometimes people put on top of your tacos,

Ellie: 5:38

Oh on Al Pastor tacos?

David: 5:40

Yes, exactly, and this is, back in the day when I still ate meat, um, but it was the moment I bit into that piece of pineapple, I really felt like Proust, I mean, equally talented, course, equally prolific. My 4,000 page novel is about to be published.

Ellie: 5:58

Forget madeleines, we've got pineapples!

David: 6:00

Yes! Um, but this experience that washes over you and catapults you back into a moment of your past that has gravitas and that is essential for your sense of identity.

Ellie: 6:12

Yeah, I agree with you that there is certainly the sense of being taken over that happens when we feel nostalgic. I would say, though, that we can actively trigger nostalgia in different ways. That's what I was doing in smelling the old shampoo bottle from when I studied abroad in Paris, just, you know, takin' whiffs of it, trying to get that experience back, or maybe it happens when I read old journals. It happens when I go back to places and I love that example that you gave, David, of going back to a place because a lot of the authors who write about nostalgia talk about it in terms of specific places. In fact Svetlana Boym, who's written about nostalgia at length, talks about nostalgia as being a longing for one's native land, and in fact the very word nostalgia is coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in his 1688 medical dissertation, where he talks about this particular experience that soldiers have while they're away or perhaps on returning home, and that's what he calls nostalgia.

David: 7:17

And I liked the root, uh, the etymology of the term, which comes from nostos, meaning to state your return and algos, which means pain. And the reason that I think this is significant is because in the act of returning, for example, with the soldiers back home, there is a sense of something being lost. There's a pain associated with nostalgia, which is another thing that differentiates it just from memory, right? We're not nostalgic for things that we remember, but that we still have, as Proust says. We are remembering things lost, and that sense of loss, I think, is a defining feature of nostalgia.

Ellie: 7:58

Absolutely. And in terms of the etymology what's really interesting here is that, as you mentioned David, it comes from these two Greek words nostos and algos, but it's this 17th century Swiss guy that coined the term. So he basically goes back and lifts these two Greek words and mashes them together in order to create a new word, which is already, to my mind, indicative of a certain nostalgia for what we in the "West" call "Classical civilizations," namely this nostalgia we have for Greece and Rome as the origin of civilization.

David: 8:31

Oh, interesting just thinking about- and etymology and philology really, as a discipline, in itself, could be said to be a nostalgic discourse, right, going back to the root.

Ellie: 8:41

For sure. A lot of people have said that about philosophy too, but maybe we'll leave that for another day. When Hofer coins this term in 1688, he is describing it as a pathology. So he's not describing nostalgia as a mere emotion, it is something that is wrong with you and something that needs to be cured. In fact, in the 18th and even the 19th century, physicians looked for what they called the bone of nostalgia because they thought we might have a particular part of our anatomy that we could just pull out and then nostalgia would be cured.

David: 9:13

Yeah. And interestingly, even as there is this medical history of nostalgia where nostalgia gets pathologized in the 17th and 18th century, at the same time, beginning in the 18th and 19th century, there is an uptake of the concept by poets and by philosophers who start thinking about nostalgia in terms of a poetic moment or as a philosophical possibility for thinking both about our personal and collective past, and our personal and collective future. So think about the German Romantics, for example, and you know, a lot of people have interpreted German Romanticism as this nostalgic discourse that tries to find an origin, a pure origin, that we've lost, especially in the wake of the Scientific Revolution.

Ellie: 9:59

Definitely. There's a longing for a kind of mythical return, usually a pastoral theme of a return to nature, or a return to childhood. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, talks about how, as adults, we are nostalgic for childhood because childhood is a time when we didn't have any responsibilities. So part of what's going on in nostalgia, for me, is this idea that it enables us to move away from the weight of freedom in the present and the pressures of the future and take refuge in a past because the past is something that's fixed already, right? It happened. We can't go back and change it. And so the past is crystallized in a way that provides solace for us. It's fixed in a way that the present in the future aren't.

David: 10:46

And Proust talks about it in the same way, because In Search of Lost Time- it's this very lengthy, you know, 4,000 pages and counting, well, not counting anymore, um-

Ellie: 10:56

I'm gonna write the sequel. What would be like whatever the eighth volume is.

David: 11:01

Yeah, I mean, In Search of Gained Time?

Ellie: 11:04

Well no, cause the last volume is already Time Regained. It'll be Time Lost Once Again. The search begins anew!

David: 11:13

But in this work, there is this theme of childhood because Proust says the thing about children is that they have not yet developed habits, and for Proust, habit is antithetical to curiosity. It is antithetical to creativity. And so the thing that he really values about children is that they can transform every aspect of their immediate world into something fantastical, into something beautiful. So, you know, for a child, what we see as just the cover or, you know, the, uh, sheet for the bed, for them, it's a fort, or a fortress. And that's precisely where they undercut the force of what Proust calls habit and adults, we're in the world of habit, right? We have are familial and familiar ways of looking at the world that gets sedimented over time. And it's very hard to break away from them. And for Proust, it's children and artists, actually, who serve as the models for breaking away from the force of habit.

Ellie: 12:18

Yeah and I think that's so interesting because in thinking about the origin of nostalgia as a pathology, you can see that part of the reason that nostalgia was considered a disease might be because it breaks people out of habits. It makes them out of sorts with their everyday habitual world, and so one thing that is talked about in early medical literature on nostalgia is the way that nostalgia makes you indifferent to the present. It inhibits your action. And it sounds like what you're saying, David, is, you know, there's a kind of beauty to that, which is this ability to take a pause, to reflect, and that having something to do with art and creation. Ultimately, you might have to move out of the moment of nostalgia in order to create but it's artists who are able to remember, who are able to revive, in fact, the past, by reviving its sensory qualities in all of their vivid details.

David: 13:10

Well and this goes to the point that nostalgia is not a single phenomenon, right? It depends a lot on the way in which you inhabit it. So you can get stuck in the past in nostalgia, but you can also use the past as a springboard for new possibilities.

Ellie: 13:27

Definitely. There's a really long history in philosophy of rejecting nostalgia because it doesn't allow you to live in the present moment. So I'm thinking here, and somewhat anachronistically because a lot of these folks are writing before nostalgia emerges as a term in 1688, but I'm thinking here about the Buddhist and Taoist traditions, this emphasis on living in the present and not thinking too much of the past or future. You see that in Christian philosophy as well and you see it in Stoicism, too. There's also this reaction against German Romanticism that you see in 19th century philosophy with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, where Schopenhauer and Nietzsche say "No! Stop remembering all the time. We actually, as humans, need to be focused more on forgetting. We need to balance our desire for memory with an impulse to forget so that we can actually act."

David: 14:15

And it's interesting that that's the Nietzschean position because at the same time, Nietzsche himself, first and foremost, was a philologist interested in the origin of concepts and words, and then became what he calls a genealogist, somebody who looks at the history of things. So even in Nietzsche, this forgetting that he's always arguing for is still rooted in a past. It's just a past that you use for the purposes of the present.

Ellie: 14:44

For sure. And I think there is a good amount of empirical research today that touts the benefits of nostalgia in some of the ways that you're describing. So for instance there's researcher Christine Bacho, who talks about how nostalgia could be a positive emotion because it's a tool for adapting to discontinuity. Nostalgia is a matter of self-soothing. When we feel chaotic, we return to these markers of the past that help orient us. And when I think about experiences when I feel nostalgic, two times when it particularly comes up are: one, after trips and two, after romantic relationships. The reason I feel nostalgic after trips is that traveling for me is a way of expressing an exciting part of my identity. I feel like I'm exploring, I'm adventuring, and I'm having these really heightened experiences. And so when I return home, I want to remember those and I want to integrate them into my home identity. Relationships are a similar case, but I think a little bit different in as much as they really crystallize our identity because when we're in a romantic relationship with another person, we're gaining a constant feedback loop of how they are perceiving us. And when that relationship is taken away, suddenly we're sort of left alone with our own thoughts and speculations. And we're wondering how we've changed based on that relationship. We're also wondering how the other person saw us and whether that was a true representation. And so fixating on the songs that we listened to with that person, on the things that we did with that person, to my mind, are actually ways of regaining a sense of self and of creating ourselves in process.

David: 16:25

And the psychologist Elena Pourtova, who is writing primarily about nostalgia in a Russian context, talks a lot about the way in which this plays out in connection to immigrant communities where nostalgia on a collective level also has this therapeutic potential insofar as it allows immigrants who find themselves in a new country, in a new language, in a new social space, to navigate this in-between-ness of their new experience. So when immigrants express nostalgia about the motherland, um, she says it's interesting, first and foremost, that they talk about it regularly as a father- or mother-land, which suggests an isomorphism between the state and the family. So the kind of attachment that we have-

Ellie: 17:09

Maybe even a desire to go back to the womb, this place of unity.

David: 17:12

Yes. And she's writing explicitly from a psychoanalytic place, so the Oedipal complex is certainly in the background. Um, but what nostalgia does for immigrant communities, on her account, is that it allows them to maintain connection, psychic connection, to a place that they can no longer geographically occupy. So it's like having one foot on the country of origin and another foot in the world that they now find themselves in, and to not have to choose between the two and to generate a new identity, precisely as in the present, but nostalgic for the past.

Ellie: 17:48

And this is also a theme in a lot of literature that comes out of the legacy of slavery in black America. This theme of nostalgia as something that is longed for by the black community, and in many cases actively barred by the white supremacy that enforces a forgetting of history by breaking up families, by disallowing native languages, by forcing Christianity, et cetera, et cetera. You see this a lot in post-colonial literature of the Caribbean as well, too. I'm thinking about Derek Walcott's text Omeros, which is a reading of Homer's Odyssey but a sort of post-colonial take on it. This desire to return home and not being sure what home actually is. So that's a bit different from the immigrant desire to keep the connection to home that you're talking about, David, because it suggests that for many communities, especially emerging out of slavery, there is a prevention of nostalgia and that's a cause for pain and loss.

David: 18:41

Let's think here about two very concrete phenomena, where we see the workings of nostalgia.

Ellie: 18:47

Cottagecore and MAGA. So an interesting subculture that's popped up in 2020 is cottagecore.

David: 18:55

Which I had never heard about.

Ellie: 18:57

You gotta get into it. All the kids are. Here is tiktoker @bimbotheory describing what cottagecore is:

Bimbotheory Tiktok: 19:04

"Why is cottagecore so popular? Well, I think it's safe to say it's a gen Z dominated aesthetic. There's a collective yearning for life before tech and, uh, cottagecore really be like that. Also, lesbians have really been denied a space in terms of gentleness and and hobbies and behaviors that have historically been considered feminine or domestic, and a lot of contemporary feminism of the 2010s rejected domesticity. It's like, I'm not going to be a fucking girl boss, cause I'm not going to have a fucking job."

David: 19:40

So Ellie, what are your thoughts about this? What am I listening to? How should I think about it?

Ellie: 19:48

Okay, so I'm hearing a lot of themes of Romanticism, right? Cottagecore involves a particular notion of domesticity that emphasizes nature. So you've got hanging out in fields and meadows, you've got picking mushrooms in the woods, you've got looking at geese on ponds, as well as an emphasis on cooking, making things by hand, sewing, knitting, and feeling at home in one's space going back to this 19th century ideal of a return to nature.

David: 20:17

So my first question is, is cottagecore anything more than an aesthetic on social media? Are there actually communities of people who, you know, go into a cottage, um, or is it really just a social media phenomenon?

Ellie: 20:33

So there are people who actually will go to a cottage So a lot of people, for instance, have rented places, uh, in the countryside during COVID. But my sense is definitely that it's happening primarily online, and as you heard it is a really important area of community-building right now for the teen community, especially queer teens. And there's this major subculture specifically of lesbian cottagecore. This sense of reclaiming what has traditionally been deemed feminine and what has been rejected by the girl-bossery feminism of the 2010s and thinking about feminism in a very domestic kind of space, in part because of the absence of access to jobs and the absence of access to public life due to COVID.

David: 21:18

Yeah, it's just anytime I hear domestic and feminism together, you know what I think about is I think about that show The Handmaid's Tale, where this neo-conservative woman writes a book called Domestic Feminism or something like it, where she calls upon women to become domestic again and respect their husbands and to go backwards in terms of the progress that the feminist movement has made. But it doesn't seem like that's exactly the same thing that's happening here.

Ellie: 21:47

Yeah, I mean it certainly raises a red-alert for me because it seems a little too close to something like the trad-wives movement, which is a traditional wives movement among women on the right who are like, "Oh men just really need to be taken care of by women. I just need to cook and clean and do all of that" and that's not to say that that's not a valid choice for women, but the trad-wives movement presents it in traditional, gender-essentialist terms. So I think the cottagecore movement is trying to resist that, perhaps almost being ironic about these themes of Romanticism, but I definitely share some worries about it, David. I mean I'm thinking here about what's up with the escapism?

David: 22:24

Well, when I started looking into this, because it did tickle my curiosity, I see a relatively clear pattern. Uh, for the most part it's white women under 30.

Ellie: 22:36

Under 25, our generation isn't really into that much.

David: 22:39

No, it's, it's definitely a gen Z phenomenon. Um, most of them are in the spring, in a sunny spot, wearing a light summer dress, typically with a pattern of like flowers, light pastel colors. Many of them have tons of makeup, in this cottage fantasy, to look as if they're sun-kissed. And they're just like, they've been working out in the fields, and so their nose is a little red. Um, and usually there's super trendy music-

Ellie: 23:06

Or a Renaissance harp playing.

David: 23:08

Yes, and so have difficulties taking this very seriously, to be honest, and really seeing it, uh, as an anti-capitalist, anti-industrialization move-

Ellie: 23:21

Well and anti-technological, because it's all happening online, right? Or most of it's happening online, so it has this analog vibe, but the folks who are posting about their cottagecore constantly on social media are looking for precisely the kinds of superficial validation that any of us seeks when we post on social media.

David: 23:38

Yes, and I think we can think about the paradoxes of cottagecore more explicitly. So you just pointed out one of them, which is that it's an anti-technological movement that unfolds on social media almost exclusively, right? Another paradox that I see is that it's presented as this, like, return to community and living with nature together, and most of the videos and most of the photos that I've seen online are actually of individuals alone in the woods. So there's only a very small difference between this and almost a libertarian dream of being in the woods yourself, providing for yourself.

Ellie: 24:19

It's like Into the Wild.

David: 24:19

Yes. It's like Into the Wild on social media.

Ellie: 24:22

Yeah I mean I do want to think about the testimonies of queer folks, especially queer teens, talking about how cottagecore is giving them some sense of belonging and liberation. And so let's take that seriously for a moment, because one thing that comes up a lot in the discourses around cottagecore is feeling this sense of isolation as a queer person, especially as a queer teen in the countryside, and wanting to reclaim a sense of belonging through nostalgia for the past and a past that one never had access to. So we might think here about Sara Ahmed, the queer theorist's claim that home can be a space of queer exploration because you don't have to be out in public as a queer person in a world that might not always accept you. Or I'm thinking too about Gaston Bachelard's claim that the home is a place for daydreaming, where you can try on different identities for yourself, as well as this idea that the cottagecore lesbian trope is valorizing femininity and traditionally feminine values in a way that could be disrupting the very masculinist girlboss narrative that we get in the 2010s.

David: 25:31

So I want to draw a distinction here because it is true that lesbian cottagecore is a whole thing onto its own, but it's not just a lesbian phenomenon. So there is also a lot of straight women, uh, cis, straight women, who are doing cottagecore and I have difficulty with that.

Ellie: 25:48

Yeah because- I understand the difficulty, but I also don't think we want to have the sort of ham-handed reading where it's like "It's bad if straight women are doing it, and it's okay if lesbians are doing it, right." So-

David: 25:58

Well, no, that's not my position. My position would not be along the lines of sexuality, but it might actually be along the lines of race, um, and so this is a little bit nuanced, but I think it goes to the question of how meaning is produced. So you have a culture that already has a set of stereotypes about domesticity and femininity, and for me, a lot of these cottagecore tiktokers are really tapping into an American fantasy of white womanhood from the 19th century, uh, of being in the Prairie with your pretty dress and being cute. That, to me, has meaning on its own independently of the intentions of the women individually who may take it up, and ultimately, I don't think meaning is produced by people and their intentions. I think meaning is produced by social structures and shared histories. And so you don't get so easily to reclaim something like this without it getting saddled with all those meanings.

Ellie: 27:01

Well so you said that you wouldn't, then, define it in terms of sexuality but in terms of race. How are you seeing race in relation to the meaning-making practices you just mentioned?

David: 27:08

For me, the reason why race enters as the dominant category through which I want to interpret cottagecore is because a lot of white lesbian cottage core, you have to be told that it's lesbian cottagecore in order for it to register as something even slightly different than just a reenactment of a dream of white femininity from the 19th century. Whereas as soon, just visually, as soon as you put a black body in this idyllic scene, that already disrupts a number narratives that, by definition, a white woman's body cannot, because of the historical association. There is a sub-community within the cottagecore movement of black women doing cottagecore and it's black women embodying a kind of femininity that has been historically denied to them. Now you might say, "Well, that's also been denied to lesbians." I'm actually not super sure that that has been historically denied to white lesbians, but what I find really interesting about black cottagecore is the relationship to place. And that is that it's black women reclaiming spaces like the countryside that have historically been sites of very deep trauma for the black community.

Ellie: 28:35

Yeah and that reminds me of one of the music videos from Beyonce's "Lemonade," where she dresses up in the outfit of the plantation wife, of the mistress, right? And there was some discourse around that because the question is: is she trying to reclaim a space for herself in what was traditionally a white place, and an extreme place of trauma for black women as you mentioned and that's powerful? Or is there an attempt to rewrite back into history, black women in a narrative of femininity that should be dismantled altogether? Like this narrative isn't liberatory for anybody, let's get rid of it, right? And so there's that kind of bivalence going on here. I will say from my perspective, I found that- that music video extremely powerful just from an affective standpoint, even if I disagree with some of the broader social structures that it might be holding in place.

David: 29:21

Yes, like, let me just give you the most simple example. If you put on a summer dress and a flower in your head, and you take a selfie as a white woman, it can read as trendy cottagecore. I, a Mexican immigrant male, putting on vintage clothes and taking a picture in the field will never register in the same way. It will register very differently. Um, and so I wish a lot more tiktokers, who are doing cottagecore, were more self-aware of this because their bucolic fantasies of being in the Prairie, um, you know, as a- as a Brown, nonwhite, viewer, mm, eh. That's my that's my professional opinion-- *wrong buzzer noise*

Ellie: 30:08

Yeah. So in that vein, I want to give a cautionary tale to our listeners.

David: 30:12

A personal cautionary tale.

Ellie: 30:15

Yes This is the cautionary tale of a former cottagecore teen, and that former cottagecore teen is none other than myself. So I grew up as a pretty privileged upper-middle class white, cisgender, conventionally pretty girl, frankly, in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and looking back I was cottagecore before cottagecore was a thing. We didn't use that term then-

David: 30:40

Are you trying to fight with Jen Sears about who's the real cottage core?

Ellie: 30:45

I'm the OG cottagecore teen.

David: 30:46

You're the queen of the cottage.

Ellie: 30:49

Right? And I mean the reason that I say I was cottagecore before it was cottagecore is because my favorite hobbies as a teenager included reading things like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, listening to music that comes from the sort of hippie tradition of the 1960s, including Judy Collins and Donovan, watching movies from that same period, um, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which is a 1970s Franco Zeffirelli movie about St. Francis of Assisi with a soundtrack that is full Donovan. That was my favorite films. I loved Emma, the movie Emma, with Gwyneth Paltrow and so I was just like fully into the cottagecore lifestyle. And looking back on it, that served to prop up so much of my white privilege and my ignorance because I just thought that I was interested in things that were beautiful and neutral and I didn't want to have to think about the ugly things in life, things that would reveal to me the horrors of the world that I lived in, and so cottagecore helped me protect myself from those horrors.

David: 31:52

And that's exactly my problem with cottagecore, which is that this retreat that you're describing here, in personal terms, has never been on the table for people with a darker skin color.

Ellie: 32:04

Yes! To illustrate this, I'm going to read you a journal entry that I wrote on October 28th, 2006. This is me writing from the Getty museum in Los Angeles, a beautiful museum, on a hilltop. This is a real journal entry, just for the record. I am putting myself on blast here more than I can possibly express for the purposes of illustrating dangers of cottagecore.

All right: 32:28

"I exhale. Pent up delusions of anxiety come streaming out. On Mount Olympus, there are no cares, only the blue sky and still trees and limestone. It is pure. Any small stain, such as a text message from the outside world, is quickly wiped away by the sun, whose laser point is fixed on the sacred mount." All right, this is where it gets real intense.

David: 32:57

That was not even the intense part? No?

Ellie: 33:00

"Who is this girl, walking through gardens, alone with an upward gaze and an enigmatic smile? Where does she fit in? Her Rafaelite blonde hair spills onto a loud, printed, red dress. She is an anomaly, or so she hopes." What the F even is that?

All right: 33:21

"Please don't trudge on my gardens with your thick-soled running shoes and heavy cameras with jarring clicks. You can't understand my garden, my gentle autumn garden."

David: 33:33

This is-

Ellie: 33:34

"You hear pebbles crunch beneath you and see the wilted morning glories so you move on. You cannot know the hidden world here because it is not loud. So leave me to tend to these sweet daisies. I will nurse them back to health."

David: 33:49

Oh, my goodness, Ellie. I think you not only just read your diary, I think you just read it cottagecore for Phil. I- I love that you were writing this, as I-

Ellie: 34:04

Tell me everything! This is- This is white supremacy in a journal entry.

David: 34:09

Well even just think about some of the language, right? Like the focus- like the Raphaelite blonde hair.

Ellie: 34:16

No, I think I meant pre-Raphaelite I know.

David: 34:18

Tending to the gardens. The image that comes to mind is basically the main character in like Gone With the Wind, you know, like this woman, Scarlett O'Hara with the, like, Southern hat, this belle, and I wish, like- don't give me Scarlett O'Hara from the first half of Gone With the Wind, give me the second half. yes, like, like just like fighting for your life, "I'll never be hungry again!"

Ellie: 34:47

But I didn't want to hear that as a teen, I wanted to enjoy this fantasy and frankly, I mean you can hear this in the entry, it is a fantasy of superiority. I am contrasting myself with the tourists. I'm contrasting myself with people who don't understand the garden. I feel like I have a special access to it. And I was writing this at the time when I didn't have a smartphone, I didn't have internet access in my bedroom, I had to go out to the garage to get internet access and I was limited to one hour a day. And so, I felt misunderstood, profoundly misunderstood, by my immediate surroundings. I didn't have any people that I could connect with this over, and there also was a kind of lack of technificiation of it, but I think what we see in this journal entry is that even when cottagecore doesn't have the irony of happening online, it is still extremely problematic. I think it's a little bit different from the cottagecore vibes you see nowadays because cottagecore is much more communal, but I wonder whether there would still be that valence of superiority that I'm getting from my own entry.

David: 35:47

And we can think about the communal aspect in terms of the practical dimension of being a member of an online community that brings with it a sense of belonging with others. But the more interesting dimension is a psychoanalytic one, which is "What's the fantasy that's being entertained by all the members of this community?" So I get it, that it's a community, but the fantasy itself, again, it's always, or for the most part, a white woman, under 30, looking beautiful under the sun by herself, in the woods, tending to a garden or a flower or the bees?

Ellie: 36:22

And perhaps feeling a unique kind of relation to that nature that they feel other people don't have, because other people can't understand it; they're too wrapped up in their, you know, inferior obsession with capitalist modes of production.

David: 36:36

Yes, and-

Ellie: 36:37

Which cottagecore depends on as a reaction to.

David: 36:40

Correct. And I don't think there's any irony here. That's the thing about cottagecore-

Ellie: 36:45

I don't know about that.

David: 36:46

I don't see anybody doing it as a way of drawing attention to it as a fantasy. Um, most of them do seem committed to the kind of identity that comes with occupying that fantasy.

Ellie: 36:57

Because ultimately, no matter who's doing it, cottagecore is valorizing a kind of nostalgia for a mythical past.

David: 37:05

Well, It's not the case that it doesn't matter who does it, because I do believe that when black women do it, it is radical because it's not about the past, it's about a future.

Ellie: 37:16

Yeah.

David: 37:17

When you see a black woman in a pastoral setting, enjoying an aristocratic setting, that's never existed, in our culture. And so it points to a new possibility that really challenges our assumptions about what our future is going to be.

Ellie: 37:32

Agreed, but that future is still envisioned as an aristocratic and/or pastoral return to nature.

David: 37:39

Yes, and I love it when black women do it. That's the conclusion here.

Ellie: 37:45

Well because I will say here, you know, I'm I'm definitely not above all kinds of hypocrisy, right? Like I think we can't avoid some level of hypocrisy and we can never be fully consistent with our beliefs. It's just a matter of struggling within those structures in which we find ourselves to be minimally hypocritical, um, or to be hypocritical in ways that aren't actively harming other people. And so I, you know, I don't think necessarily we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I still love Judy Collins, Donovan, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and I always will. I think I'm just concerned with the resonances of superiority that might go along with it, especially in the case of somebody like myself who is a cisgender, white woman, former cottagecore teen.

David: 38:27

Yeah, exactly.

Ellie: 38:28

So go out and enjoy your cottagecore or maybe don't.

David: 38:36

Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 38:44

We're recording this soon after the 2020 election, where Trump has lost, but I think you and I both definitely share the view that MAGA is not going away anytime soon. Just because Trump lost, we don't get to go back to this liberal fantasy of the way things were before and MAGA is something that's going to continue to wield power, hence it exists as a danger, and it's worth analyzing and critiquing.

David: 39:09

And one of the central themes that I see as unifying Trump's supporters, hyper-conservative pundits, the MAGA crowd, is this relationship to an American past that no longer exists and never really existed in the first place. And so there's that collective fantasy here that you see in forming, uh, support for the far-right.

Ellie: 39:32

Yeah.

David: 39:32

Trump supporters, on my interpretation, suffer from a kind of collective nostalgia that we need to talk about as nostalgia.

Ellie: 39:42

Definitely. This idea that we need to make America great again implies two things. It implies one, that America once was great and two, that it is no longer great. So the question is when was America great?

Daily Show interviewer: 39:58

"What year was America great?"

Daily Show interviewees: 40:02

"When it was founded."

Daily Show interviewer: 40:05

"Except for the slavery stuff?"

Daily Show interviewees: 40:08

"Except for the slavery stuff, you know." "I think we were probably our strongest immediately post-World War II."

Daily Show interviewer: 40:14

"So around the 1950s?"

Daily Show interviewees: 40:17

"Mid forties, fifties."

Daily Show interviewer: 40:18

"I mean, I think the fifties was great other than, uh, you know, segregation and women's rights."

Daily Show interviewees: 40:24

"We can- we can sit here and paint negative faces of all times in America-"

Daily Show interviewer: 40:29

"Correct."

Ellie: 40:30

So here we see a couple of interviews with MAGA supporters and they offer two articulations of when America was great: the founding of the country, right, and then the 1950s. So I guess I'm wondering what does this image look like, right? The interviewers pointed out that these folks are taking a very selective view of history. Let's think about what they might be buying into here. What's the picture of nostalgia for MAGA?

David: 40:56

You can think about very traditional gender norms, you can think about a certain organization of the economy, you can think about the preservation of white privilege, you can think about a moment in time when America occupied a certain role on the international stage.

Ellie: 41:14

Yeah and to put it very concretely, I think one of the things that the MAGA supporters want to return to is traditional gender norms. Before MeToo, certainly, where men could, you know, do whatever they wanted to women and get away with. It It's all fun and games, joking, harassment in the workplace, um, perhaps some of them even want to go back to an era where women didn't have a place in the workforce at all. That's the trad-wives movement, this idea of the traditional wives where you should stay in the home. We also see anti-immigration sentiment, right? So this idea that America is white. Okay, when was it ever white? Um, that's an open question. And then also, one of the dynamics, especially in the support for MAGA among people in the Rust Belt, is the myth of the factory worker, right? The blue collar myth that Trump has tried to revive and frankly has very unsuccessfully done so in the concrete, given the globalization of the economy that we kind of can't go back on at this point.

David: 42:12

And yet, at the same time, MAGA revolves and orbits around a figure, and I'm here thinking about the- the cultish figure that is Trump who represents-

Ellie: 42:25

Yeah.

David: 42:25

just the most excessive forms of privilege, the kind of person that doesn't give a shit about that worker that idolizes him.

Ellie: 42:35

Yeah. I mean, how ironic is it that Trump is not only the son and grandson of immigrants, but is also married to an immigrant, not to mention the fact of his extraordinary class privilege and the fact that he is a "liberal coastal elite," and so, yeah, what is going on here with this nostalgia? How is Trump able to mobilize this nostalgia so effectively when it actually does not pertain very much his own life experience?

David: 42:59

Well, the thing that does pertain to his life experience is his whiteness. He loves to relish in his whiteness. He loves capitalize on his whiteness and he doesn't hide that desire to cash in on the privileges of being a white man. And here you see the white, uh, supremacy really acting out in the most literal of ways and in the most symbolic of ways. You see it literally-

Ellie: 43:24

Mm.

David: 43:24

In all those cheers that happened at Trump rallies whenever a black person would be removed from the crowd, where just the mere act of expelling a black body was enough to get entire crowd in this ecstatic-

Ellie: 43:40

Wow.

David: 43:41

wave of affect, because it became clear that there is a logic of purification at work in MAGA. It's not just about making America great again, it's about America great again by purging that which is seen as un-American, which in this-

Ellie: 43:56

Yes.

David: 43:57

case is a codeword. It's a whistle, for anything that is nonwhite and it's that literal dimension, but also this symbolic dimension, it's this focus on the blue collar worker who lives in a two bedroom house and goes to work maybe eight to five-

Ellie: 44:14

Yeah, I think MAGA is ultimately inseparable from the idea that white people, especially white men, are the essential Americans. We are the ones who deserve to be here and that everybody else just needs to fall in line. And there- and it's not just any white man. They are generally anti-intellectual, and they really want to preserve their freedom, considered in a extremely libertarian way as freedom from government interference.

David: 44:41

It's very interesting to me that a lot of people try to understand middle America along the lines of the concept of false consciousness. How are these working class whites voting for somebody who does not really further their interests?

Ellie: 44:57

Yeah. There's a book by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, that actually came up just a little bit before the election, but then there's Hillbilly Elegy and all-

David: 45:04

Yes-

Ellie: 45:05

these things.

David: 45:05

I absolutely hate Hillbilly Elegy and it's author, who's basically come out as an alt-right hyper-conservative figure.

Ellie: 45:12

I've some very damning things.

David: 45:14

Which you can read already in the book. I read that book several years ago and I could just read the subtext-

Ellie: 45:20

Back when it was the darling of the liberal coastal elite, it's trying to understand the MAGA people!

David: 45:24

Yes, exactly. but the point here is that I think it's a mistake to assume that the conservative working class, whites are voting against their interests, because I think that community is actually a lot more aware of what its interests are.

Ellie: 45:39

Yeah.

David: 45:40

One of its main interests is preserving white supremacy. And it's interesting that if you look at the history of U.S. politics, working-class whites have always occupied this very interesting point, because it's always an open question where their allegiances will go. Are they going to ally themselves other working class people, especially people of color, or will they instead align themselves along the lines of race with upper whites? And it, historically you can see strategizing by those in power as a divide and conquer of who gets the poor whites.

Ellie: 46:22

Definitely!

David: 46:23

Because if you get them to break from their working class interests, you've made it.

Ellie: 46:27

Yeah, I think one of the most powerful tools for mobilizing the white working class against their best interest in alliance, in solidarity, with other working class folks is nostalgia. It is, you know, white supremacy operates on the basis of nostalgia and is propped up by mobilizing it affectively, by giving folks an investment, a feeling of what they once had or what their ancestors once had, which they have now lost. Going back to something you said much earlier, David, about how people tend to feel nostalgia when they are parted from their native lands, here you might wonder, well, do the MAGA folks feel somehow displaced? Do they feel like immigrants? This is what Arlie Hochschild's book Strangers in Their Own Land is about.

David: 47:18

The MAGA people, they're engaged in this fantasy construction of a time when America was great, but there's a refusal to recognize that this idealization cannot be a reality these days, right?

Ellie: 47:30

Yeah.

David: 47:31

The 1940's aren't coming back.

Ellie: 47:32

Well, yeah, and actually in its origin, nostalgia was described as an erroneous representation and some of the symptoms associated with it were actually hearing voices and seeing ghosts. So there is this sense that nostalgia is wrapped up in mistaking the past for reality.

David: 47:50

Yeah and I think here we can differentiate, following the work of the psychologist, Harvey Kaplan, between what he calls normal nostalgia and pathological nostalgia. And he makes the argument that there are two ways of relating to nostalgia, more than necessarily two types of nostalgia. One of them is a depressive kind of nostalgia, where you remember a past that maybe you idealized, but you do that remembering with the full awareness, the full realization, that that past is indeed passed. There is a loss that has happened and you don't shy away from that. And that's why it's a depressive nostalgia. Interestingly, for Kaplan, that's normal nostalgia.

Ellie: 48:37

Huh.

David: 48:38

That's good nostalgia. It's the one that recognizes that you cannot turn back time. By contrast, there is a pathological expression of nostalgia that simply seeks gratification in entertaining this fantasy of a time in the Golden Age where things used to be better, and you indulge in this idealization really without admitting that it is an idealization.

Ellie: 49:05

That said, I might want to qualify the distinction between normal and pathological. I feel like you would be on board with this, David, given a lot of your research, because of course the line between the normal and the pathological is not always clear and it can be extremely problematic.

David: 49:20

No. That's right. And so one way to get at that distinction without relying on that problematic language of normal versus pathological is to go back to the writings of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Freud makes the argument that, over the course of our lives, we get to all kinds of things. When we lose some of those objects of desire, for example, when a loved one dies or when we move away from our country of origin, there is a real question that the Ego faces, which is how to respond to that loss. And according to Freud, there are two different ways of responding to that loss. One is what he calls the work of mourning, which is that you go through a process of mourning the loss of that object, and that process of mourning is essential for your health and allows you to eventually move forward with your life. But Freud differentiates that from what he calls melancholia, and melancholia is what happens when mourning gets disrupted. The people that continue behaving as if their now deceased husband or wife were still alive or the people that don't really change their way of thinking about the world, even when the pillars of their previous worldview are not there anymore. The subject gets stuck because you're holding onto this thing that no longer exists and you cannot move forward.

Ellie: 50:49

Yeah, and that takes us back to my earlier mention of relationships as producing nostalgia, because I think there's a way that, at the end of a romantic relationship, you can reflect on it in a manner that enables you to get over it. Or you can reflect on it in a way that produces this really vicious cycle of rumination and obsession and makes it impossible to get over no matter how long ago the relationship ended. I might also want to say that even the line between mourning and melancholy can be blurred and I would be remiss as somebody who has worked a lot on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida in not mentioning this, because Derrida says that in all mourning there is melancholy and in all melancholy there is mourning. I'm thinking here about my suggestion earlier, that nostalgia has to do with our identity. For Freud what happens in melancholy is that rather than getting over the person who has died, you sort of keep it inside. You lock it up within yourself and build your identity around it. And so I'm wondering if nostalgia in as much as it helps build our identity for us always has a trace of melancholy.

David: 51:57

Correct. And I think as a philosophical point, that's very well taken, that in every act of projecting onto the future, we always carried this little vault of the past that we can not let go of. So it's a philosophical point about the impossibility of truly being over the past in an absolute way. Nonetheless, as a practical, political point about the society in which we live, I think there is a very clear difference between the mourning of those of us who relate to a certain American past as something that is passed, and the MAGA crowd that does seem to be stuck in a melancholic or in a melancholic relationship.

Ellie: 52:39

So in her book Minor Feelings, which is about her experience growing up as an Asian-American, Cathy Park Hong gives a reading of the Wes Anderson film Moonrise Kingdom, which is like most Wes Anderson movies, extremely nostalgic. And this film is about two tweens, basically, who fall in love and they escape from their homes and go hang out in nature. And it takes place in 1965. And Hong ties this film to a very dangerous kind of white nostalgia, where she says we're stuck in a time loop, refusing to acknowledge the radical changes that have taken place since 1965. And Hong here draws on the work of queer theorist Lauren Berlant, who in turn is drawing on the work of a cultural anthropologist named C. Nadia Seremetakis. Berlant buys the kind of distinction that you're describing in as much as one is this kind of "bad" bad quote nostalgia that wants homogeneity and the other that is refusing state and capitalist strategies of domination and starting something new. And she says, yeah, there is this distinction, but it's also a shaky one. And we constantly have to be vigilant about which one we're falling into.

David: 53:49

Yeah, and I think with MAGA, what we find is that case where that line has clearly been crossed to the point where maybe a return from melancholia to mourning becomes increasingly difficult to make.

Ellie: 54:03

All right, David, I'm going to go back and read some of my journals.

David: 54:08

Please do and reminisce about all the things that have been lost in you not continuing to be a Raphaelite, uh, figure attending to your garden. Um, it's been great and thank you to our listeners.

Ellie: 54:24

Take care.

David: 54:25

Bye-bye.

Ellie: 54:25

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

David: 54:33

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at DearOverthink@gmail.com.

Ellie: 54:41

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 54:55

Thanks so much for joining us today!