E0036 Nescience and Excession: Jameson and Nostalgia

Further detail looking at The Nostalgia Curve from Episode 35, and comparing it with the Fredric Jameson's "Nostalgia for the Present" (1989) to see what the established literature says about the topic.  We go into Jameson's writing on science fiction and Philip K Dick's "Time Out of Joint" (1959), and take a deep look at the Rumsfeld Matrix in order to introduce the idea of Nescience: the intentional act of not engaging with a known-unknown.

Transcript

Let me ask you a question. Do you ever have something that you know you need to know, but you know you can't know just yet? Yeah, me too. In February of 2002, the world was introduced to the concept of Unknown Unknowns by then U. S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. 

"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know." 

Because of the way it was presented, and the seeming incongruity of it, it instantly became fodder for the comedians on late night TV.

But it is one of those things that makes sense if you stop to think about it for even more than a moment. As Rumsfeld stated, Unknown unknowns are those things that we don't know that we don't. But here we're talking about something a little bit different. These are things that we know we don't know.

More like the known unknowns that Rumsfeld talked about back then. But rather than rushing out and finding out what it's all about immediately, we hold off for a little bit longer. In order to get our own thoughts down. This is an act of nescience, and when it comes to the nostalgia curve that we talked about last episode, I had to hold off for a little while, but now it's time to fill in those gaps in this episode of The Implausipod.

Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. And early on, when I began looking at Nostalgia in the beginning of August, it became very clear that there were some key authors that had written on Nostalgia. Authors that I was aware of, but authors I'd never engaged with yet.

So in order to get my own thoughts down and kind of get everything together, I had to engage in that act of nescience, of not looking at what those authors had written until I had everything down that I wanted to say for myself. And this act of nescience comes from having a pretty good idea of what the limits of my knowledge is and where the things that I know come from.

Now, this may be a side effect of working on a PhD, of developing that body of knowledge and intensely studying things, but also comes from some reflective practice of looking at what you know, citing the information and keeping track of everything. So when it came to looking at nostalgia, I knew that Frederick Jameson had written on nostalgia in a work called nostalgia for the present.

I've seen the title before, but I had never engaged with it directly. So I had to put that aside as a TBR to be read. So, nescience. Now nescience is lack of knowledge full stop. It's contrasted with something like ignorance, which is the act of not knowing. And you might be saying, well, isn't my intentional act of not engaging with Jameson an act of ignorance?

Well, kinda. The popular, or, you know, Lay understanding of ignorance is generally that wilful stupidity that happens. And here we're trying to describe an intentional act of delayed learning. And I wanted to dissociate it from all the negative connotations that ignorance has. Nescience is the unknown. In this case, both the known unknown and unknown unknown that Rumsfeld spoke of.

The thing that we don't know that we don't even know. Many of the mysteries of the universe would fall within this category, for we are tiny and small creatures on a little rock far off in a distant galaxy. Besides, Nescient sounds better, and we'll lean towards the poetic where we can. There might be lots of things we're all Nescient about.

Often this comes up in the terms of, like, media titles, like books we haven't read, TV shows we haven't seen, movies we haven't watched yet, games we haven't played. We might know of them, and given the way modern marketing works, it might be impossible to escape them, but there could be things out there that we've never ever seen.

Even though we've seen so many clips and memes and spoofs and parodies that it feels like we've seen the whole movie. For me, this includes things like Titanic and Schindler's List, Frozen, American Psycho, Sopranos, Lost, and the list goes on and on and on. Some of the titles that I haven't seen might surprise you, but there's a lot of stuff out there, and we're all constrained with respect to time and resources.

Our time on this planet is finite, after all, and there's more videos that are uploaded to YouTube every single minute that can be seen in a human lifetime, so, we gotta pick and choose, right? And sometimes what we pick and choose is dependent on what we've seen in the past, which reminds me of that Rumsfeld bit from the beginning.

Now I've put a copy of the Rumsfeld Matrix up on the blog because describing something that's inherently visual often seems like a fruitless task, but there's many copies of it floating around. So a quick trip to the old Bing there should find you some results. Remember we don't Google in 2024. But within that matrix, we end up with four categories, the known-knowns, the stuff that we know that we know, stuff we can recall readily and state with confidence.

We have the known unknowns. And this is things that we know we don't know. We're aware of, they might be out there. It could be a book or a movie or whatever, as we mentioned before. This also includes things like weather, travel. external events that happen while you're not paying attention, that kind of stuff.

And you might not know about it yet, but you'll find out soon. And then there's the unknown unknowns, things we don't know that we don't know. These are outside of context problems. They're outside our ability to even imagine in some cases. And we'll get into the details of these in just a moment. And there's a fourth category that Rumsfeld left out that's rather obvious.

It's the unknown-knowns. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek sniffed this out, and these are the things that we are unaware that we know. These could be tacit knowledge, or instinctual knowledge that we would struggle to explain, or things that we've forgotten that were part of our memory. And according to Žižek, they're also items which one intentionally refuses to acknowledge.

Like, I can't know that. These include Disavowed beliefs and other things we pretend not to know about, even though they're probably part of our public values. This can be hazardous in some cases. But Zizek has somewhat of a narrow focus here. In The Unknown Knowns, one of the key elements is that of memory, and memory ties directly into nostalgia.

Memories can be with us constantly, but they often can lay dormant and come rushing back to us in a flood if they're triggered by something. And those groups that are trying to operationalize the nostalgia curve, and often for monetary gain, are doing a whole lot to bounce up and down on those triggers.

Trying to evoke or elicit long forgotten memories of childhood, of toys or cartoons, of lazy Saturday mornings and long summer days, and market them or re market them to an older, more mature, and gainfully employed audience that's been carefully diagnosed and segmented. And this is where a lot of the literature on nostalgia resides.

And why I had to engage in an act of nescience. Frederic Jameson is a literary critic and philosopher who, as of the recording of this episode in 2024, is the director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. He's written a lot in a lot of fields, most notably on things like postmodernism and capitalism, and Nostalgia for the Present was one of his key works.

Originally published in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1989, it's been reprinted in various books and collections of his since, such as 1992's Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which, given some of the topics that we've talked about here on this podcast, you might be surprised I haven't read either.

But, as we said, time is finite, and we come to these things as we're meant to. So for me, that intentional act of not engaging with it, that act of nescience was me understanding that, yes, he's written a lot on it, but I wanted to get my own thoughts on nostalgia down as best I could, which we've seen in the previous episode on the podcast, as well as the number of blog posts over on the implosive.

blog and. Getting those down helped me to get a sense of where I am and how that would be in relation to what Jameson has written. So to quickly summarize our last episode, for us nostalgia is representational in a memetic way. You might say that nostalgia is an assemblage that puts various parts together and that the perceived value of the nostalgia of a property can impact financing and development of that property.

This value is subjective and also relative, so Different producers might value it differently. Nostalgia is often subjective and can be constraining because you're limited by what's gone before. Nostalgia can be contrasted with novelty or that idea of something new. And real nostalgia can be the audience longing for something that was actually produced.

Whereas imagined nostalgia is something the audience thinks they've seen before. And nostalgia can be organic, coming from the audience, or manufactured by the producer. Finally, we could say that nostalgia is also substrate neutral. It means it can happen in almost any field, especially with respect to the arts.

But it's also transferable. It's a transmedia property. That, if I have nostalgia for Pokemon, for instance, I might be interested in a Pokemon video game, even though I only really watched the cartoons when I was young. I don't know why I'm referencing Pokemon specifically. But It's clearly after my time, but In any event, what does Jameson have to say about nostalgia?

Nostalgia for the Present is a piece of media criticism where Jameson looks at the role of nostalgia in three works, Philip K. Dick's novel Time Out of Joint from 1959, Jonathan Demme's Something Wild from 1986, and David Lynch's Blue Velvet, also from 1986. The three titles comprise a unique selection of content, or at least as diverse as one as one might choose to analyze on any given topic, I suppose, though given the breadth of what we cover here on this channel, I shouldn't be much to criticize or throw stones in glass houses and all that.

Time Out of Joint is a faux time travel story where a man who was apparently trapped in the 1950s notices small differences in errors in reality, which leads him to suspect that something weird is going on. Kind of like the deja vu moment in The Matrix. These themes are typical of Philip K. Dick.

They're what we've come to expect, the representations of reality and the notion that there's something behind the scenes and the wavering nature of it. The false consciousness that often pervades his work. Looking at it in 2024, we've seen so many of those elements and other adaptations of it. The Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report, and more.

Time Out of Joint seems almost unique among Philip K. Dick's works in that it hasn't been adapted for film or television yet. Truth be told has been copied many, many times before in time out a joint. The protagonist sense that there's something else going on behind the reality is quite astute. He is captured in a Potemkin village of the 1950s, rebuilt in 1997 during an interstellar civil war.

It's not quite like the 1997 and our reality, of course, we're obviously nowhere near to interstellar capabilities and like a lot of older science fiction is now firmly rooted in our past. In a future that will not come to be. At times, Time Out of Joint feels more like a rough draft of The Truman Show, the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey, where the apparatus moves around to ensure the world is static for this one particular man, and this feeds into our various narcissistic main character desires.

And while The Truman Show isn't quite a direct copy, the film clip that best describes Time Out of Joint would be the epilogue to Captain America the First Avenger. Where he wakes in a room and recognizes from the radio broadcasts that things are not quite what they seem. If there was a Cliff Notes version of this 220 page novel, that would probably be it.

But, there's more. Jameson notes how Time Out of Joint is set up to be a model of the 1950s. As something that the protagonist will accept. which again echoes the Matrix in that the machine's creation of the late 1990s as their virtual world in order to pacify the humans that are kept in the endless rows of creches.

So aside from elements from Time Out of Joint appearing in at least three major motion pictures, I'm pretty Much like many of the works of Philip K. Dick, which have been copied so many times, like at least six by our count, that it's hard to recognize that original source. Maybe that speaks to why this hasn't been adapted anywhere else, or at least not directly.

As Jameson states, Time Out of Joint, quote, is a collective wish fulfillment and the expression of a deep unconscious yearning for a simpler and more human social system. A small town utopia very much in the North American frontier. tradition. And this is where that nostalgia comes in. We mentioned last episode how you can have cultural and social and political nostalgia for those simpler times where things were kind of more manageable.

And that yearning can be felt by a lot of people, which means it could be operationalized and mobilized and directed to various purposes. But again, this is nothing new. Jameson was writing in 1989 about something from 1959, and this cycles back much, much further. Jameson wrote about two other titles, too, of course, Demme's Something Wild and Lynch's Blue Velvet, and while they're fantastic films, they're here mostly to bolster Jameson's case and provide further evidence that allowed him to triangulate towards the element of nostalgia that he's looking for, as our familiarity and focus is more towards the science fiction side of things here on the ImplausiPod.

We'll stick towards that and see what Jameson has to say about science fiction.

For Jameson, science fiction is a category. And if you're hearing that with me making bunny ear signs, then you're hearing correctly. Nowadays, we might just want to call it a genre. One that came about during that Eisenhower period, a period of the U. S. conquering space and battling communists. And all the ideology that's inherently bound within the literature from that era.

The category might be bigger, going large to include some real lit, like Moore's Utopia and others. Or it might be more tightly bound to the pulp novels. Personally, I like the expansive view of sci fi for our point of view, one that loops in Shelley's Frankenstein by definition and intent and starts maybe with Jules Verne writing Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864 because that scoops up H.

G. Wells's stuff as well and gives us a really strong foundation for what science fiction is. The classic era of science fiction is probably that 1950s era, the golden age of rocket ships and the like. A particular vision of the future, both technologically and aesthetically. An aspirational view of the future that helps to come to terms and process our own history, understand how we feel.

fit within the current era. Basically, how did we get to now? Jameson contrasts sci fi with the historical novel, a cultural form that along with costume films and period dramas on TV reflected the ideology of the feudal classes and had fallen off throughout the late 20th century as the then new middle class sought something different, something alien that amped up their own achievements. 

Sci fi came on the scene and said, hold my ray gun, I got this. The historical novel failed not simply due to the feudalist ideals, but because according to Jameson, quote In the postmodern age, we no longer tell ourselves our history in that fashion, but also because we no longer experience it that way, and indeed, perhaps no longer experience it at all.

End quote. For Jameson, at least at the time, our mediated nature meant that we were living in an ahistorical age. And while this may have been true in 1989, I don't know if that's any longer the case. The recent rise in historicism and historicity in its forms in the 21st century may suggest that various authors talking about the rise of techno feudalism might be more right than we suppose.

But there's another question there. Did the return to those historical feudal ideals, the types of stories you tell about kings and queens, become more popular because we are living in that type of age? Or did they help bring it about? Which came first, Shakespeare in Love and Lord of the Rings, or Technofeudalism. Hard to say, but this feels like something we should save for the ongoing debate about fantasy versus sci fi, and we'll touch in on that at a later point in time. For Jameson, science fiction is an aspirational vehicle for the masses who are rejecting the previous historical viewpoint.

Compared to the historical novel, Quote, Science fiction equally corresponds to the waning of the blockage of that historicity, and particularly in our own time in the postmodern era, to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression. End quote. There are a lot of reasons why this occurs, and they have less to do with the content, though there are parts of that too, to be sure, or at least particular aesthetic choices that are made, and more to do with the socio economic conditions of today.

post World War II USA, and North America, and the United Kingdom. And again, this is another place where nostalgia starts to come in, because both historical novels and sci fi have a tie to the imagination, an imagined past, or an imagined future. They can use representation in their relationship with the past or future, but they are really a perception of the present as history, a way that we can look at our own situation through a few steps removed.

This is the conceit that's seen throughout the Star Treks, the Star Wars, the Warhammers, the Aliens, the other is but an aspect of ourselves, our society, and our culture that we are trying to take a closer look at. And in Time Out of Joint, that society that we're trying to take a closer look at is the 1950s.

Philip K. Dick was writing Time Out of Joint in 1959, or at least it was published then, he was probably writing it a little bit earlier, and he was looking at the decade that just passed and choosing what the essential elements might look like from the perspective of someone from 1997. the year of the fictional interstellar war in the novel, and for the most part, he got it right.

Jameson presents us with a list of things that evoke the 1950s from time out of joint. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, PTAs, and the like. And if the list that Jameson gives us reads like a certain Billy Joel song, that's probably not by accident. Though, we didn't start the fire also being released in 1989 is almost certainly coincidental.

Nostalgia can often look like a collection of stuff in some hoarder's back room. The items are referents to that era, not facts per se, but ideas about those facts. The question Jameson asks, the thesis for his whole paper, is did the period see itself this way? And Philip K. Dick's choices seem to suggest that the answer is yes.

There's a realistic feel to how PKD describes the 1950s, a feel that arises from the cultural reference that are used. And Jameson notes that if there is a quote unquote realism in the 50s, in other words, it is presumably to be found there in mass cultural representation, the only kind of art willing and able to deal with the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town of normalcy and non deviant everyday life, end quote.

So for a spectator looking back from the 1980s The image of the 1950s comes from the pop culture artifacts that the people in the 1950s understood themselves by as well. We're looking at them from a distance, through a scanner, darkly. And one that's getting darker over time.

What this whole process accomplishes is a process of reification. The reality gets blurred by the nostalgic elements, and this ends up becoming the signifier that represents the whole. So our sense of ourselves and of any moment in history may have little or nothing to do with reality. The objective reality, that is.

Which is the biggest Philip K. Dick style head trip that you've ever felt before. It's hard to put it into words. Though all the works of Philip K. Dick and all the Philip K. Dickensian inspired media out there keep trying to show us and tell us over and over again, it's tricky though. There's a lot of speculation that's required, and time out of joint is ultimately a piece of space.

Speculative fiction, quote, it is a speculation which presupposes the possibility that at an outer limit, the sense people have of themselves and their own moment of history may ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with its reality. End quote, how we think of ourselves, our histories and our generations are only tied to a fractions of the things that are out there.

And much of it may be that imagined nostalgia we talked about a little while ago. There's a whole lot of unknowns out there, and all of us are privy to only a small fraction of what's available. And this brings us back to what we were talking about near the beginning. Now, what did Frederick Jameson have to say about nostalgia in total, and how does that connect with the concept of the nostalgia curve that we introduced last episode?

Are there elements of the Jamesonian idea of nostalgia and what he was talking about that at least connect with us? And we can kind of see that in at least three of his books. four of our categories. We can see how our idea of nostalgia being a representation of a thing rather than being the thing itself is fundamental to Jameson's work and carries on throughout it.

The idea of a thing, not the thing themselves. And for Jameson, those mediated examples coming from pop culture versions then informing the quote unquote generational logic for successive viewers is important too. It connects with our idea of imagined nostalgia, the kind that the audience thinks that they are remembering rather than they actually experienced.

Jameson himself doesn't really distinguish between different kinds of nostalgia, at least not in the ways that we do. He doesn't look at the source of where it is produced, but looks at what the nostalgia is for, hence the title, obviously. A 1980s audience looking for the imagined view of the 1950s or an interstellar warrior in the text longing for their imagined view of the same decade, or a writer from that decade of the 1950s constructing a longing for the decade while it is still happening.

These are all nostalgia writ large to Jameson, whereas we've increased the granularity a little bit to fine tune our analysis in the nostalgia curve last episode. Jameson looks at the construction of nostalgia in various media, novels and film in this case, though there could be others, and this ties in with our idea of substrate neutrality, that the nostalgia curve could be a transmedia property and not particularly tied to any one kind or another.

So whether we're looking at Pokemon or action figures or whatever, we can see it across the various realms. The elements of nostalgia that we looked at that were focused on value are largely absent from Jameson's work. They're not completely absent, but he was looking for reification of ideology that takes place via nostalgia and not necessarily at the production culture, political economy elements that we're looking at that tie back directly to the development of new titles in Hollywood or beyond.

Now, there's more to nostalgia than just the meaty aspects, though, and we'll need to take a look at the connection that nostalgia has with memory. The other place that nostalgia is showing up in is part of our soylent culture, which we mentioned earlier. The various bits and pieces of past properties that show up or are dredged back up by the cultural saves that are our generative AI tools and the platforms that encourage their use as spreadable media.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan talked about how new media is built out of the pieces of the old, and nowhere is that more true than our current online culture. So we'll have to take a deeper look at this next episode. I hope you join us then, on the Implausipod.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the Implausipod. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I'm responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4.

0 share alike license. You may have noticed at the beginning of the show that we described the show as an academic podcast, and you should be able to find us on the Academic Podcast Network when that gets updated. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there's no cost associated with the show.

But it does grow from word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two, and pass it along. There's also a Buy Me A Coffee link on each show at implausipod. com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we've started up a monthly newsletter.

There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes, and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what's to come ahead of time, so consider signing up and I'll leave a link in the show notes. Until then, take care and have fun.