Is there anyone who's written about the all-encompassing state of nostalgia our culture seems to be mired in at the...

Is there anyone who's written about the all-encompassing state of nostalgia our culture seems to be mired in at the moment?

By this I mean not only its mainstream manifestation in the form of endless movie re-boots, sequels and re-makes, top 40 EDM remixes of older more memorable songs by Biggie Smalls or Toto or A-ha, but also its underground counterpart, vaporwave/future funk and Kickstarter spiritual successors to old game franchises such as Mighty No. 9, Obduction, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Just curious if any authors or lecturers have something to say about it.

I'm curious if this is so much different from the past

I'm sorry for shitting up your thread with common joe speculation

But two things: stuff like this has proven itself to make money
Second thing: perhaps it can make people re-experience the same feelings they had, as the brain now associates those things with those feelings and releases sum of dat good dopamine

Well it definitely has something to do with our culture's desire to return to and recapture childhood. I would also argue that it has a lot to do with the fact that it has become really expensive to make new stuff because of technology and older nostalgic things will sell. Also, isn't this a lot of what Eliot was writing about in the Waste Land? That all we have left is to quote and reuse the genius of older poets?

>Well it definitely has something to do with our culture's desire to return to and recapture childhood.
This strikes me as woo, what makes thy think so, huh? The idea that the market wants us to lengthen our childhood at least makes some sense, because it means more money. And even then, in the past you had people with hobbies, some consider to be, immature.

>That all we have left is to quote and reuse the genius of older poets?
This is what seems the most likely to me. I mean, have you seen recent '''''artistic works'''' such as the most recent novels, films and big budget video games? They are mostly garbage with some of the worst writing.

What makes you think the past was anything different, only a few works of art make it through history

I have no idea what "woo" could possibly mean but I think it's pretty impossible not to see that, America at least, is obsessed with being a child. I mean it would take a really long essay to fully dive into this but just some examples I see are the whole phenomena with people reducing each other to only what a child notices (race, gender, etc), incessant tattling on one another, unbridled aggression when one doesn't get their way, unrestrained hedonism reminds me of children just discovering their "parts", the internet itself with its whining/easy interface/simplistic reductions/, adults playing video games, it being cool to enjoy childhood objects, our president being a literal child... They say our government is the enactment of its people's fantasies and I have to agree, obsession with money which is extremely easy to make sense of, anytime someone does something bad in the news or even anytime something needs an explanation people will always resort to talking about what went wrong in the childhood.

>only a few works of art make it through history
True, but that doesn't mean what didn't make it through history garbage. Taking the art of music as an example, just because George Frederick Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach are remembered and Johann David Heinechen, Franz Benda, Giovanni Platti, Johann Adolph Hasse etc. are not doesn't mean that they were forgotten for making bad music. A layman wouldn't be able to tell the composers apart. Generally the barrier to entry to entry was very high for the arts in the past.

I was going to say schizotypy instead of woo but that would lead to more confusion and misunderstanding, I'm saying that - and I don't mean that to offend you - you could be seeing patterns what you want to see, but are not actually there

It is not uncommon in history for feelings about their epoch to reoccur. Plato already complained about consumerism, and moral decline and language decline are common tropes in history, and similarly people of all time periods complain about the lack of art in the newer generations, that doesn't mean such things are necessarily untrue, it just makes me personally skeptical that they are actually a thing - hence my, maybe annoying, questions here

You just gave your reasons why you think that, and while I don't agree, I see why you think that way

...

DFW's essay on TV (E Unibus Pluram)

It's weird that fifty years old songs from the 60s still get played on the radio and in bars etc
In the 90s nobody played Glen miller or count basie

It's just such an easy way to make money. Look at the upcoming DBZ fighting game. Even if the game is 10/10 awesome if they made it with fresh new characters and it had no connection to Dragon Ball then like 3/4 of people would not be interested at all. People like to go with the stuff they know. Are you going to spend your money on a new world/story that you may hate or stick to what you've already established as liking? This is more a business tactic then a problem with nostalgia.

Hey dinkuses, Eliot encourages allusion to the past because of its superiority to the present and the legitimacy it lends 'current' works. It's not a negative thing in his view, and completely novel exploration is inarticulate when viewed through this lens.

It also has NOTHING to do with nostalgia and derivative creation.

>you could be seeing patterns what you want to see, but are not actually there

Well then can't we extend this to everything? At what point do we just throw up our hands and say that there aren't any discernible cultural threads? I'm not sure if you're accusing me of paranoia, but it certainly seems like you are. But then you say that things like this repeat in history, tropes etc... Of course, you can only be a human at the end of the day. But how is that not a species of paranoia itself? The notion that everything has already been played out and we can find similar questions and problems in another era? Anyway, I was just answering the question about our culture's nostalgia, not saying one iota about consumerism although the connections can be made.

you're reading the poem extremely superficially

Sounds interesting, might try to write about nostalgia sometime.

>I'm not sure if you're accusing me of paranoia
Absolutely not, I told you to not take this personal. That is not what I mean.
I mean that people, not just you, make up narratives which can sound to make sense but that are actually not really there.

But I don't really want to argue this, I'm just skeptical that's all

"Eliot" not "The Waste Land" i.e. "the poem". Read his essays, you absolute goon.

which ones? I have his complete prose and an anthology of studied criticism of his work.