Notes on Fauxstalgia
Fauxstalgia– a longing for a past that never was, wistful affection for times which did not exist.
In this text, I wish to propose and elaborate upon the idea of fauxstalgia. Faux-, a prefix which refers at once to something fake and artificial; and -stalgia, from the English word nostalgia, which refers to a longing for a past state of being.
One cannot possibly imagine a society more dependent on fauxstalgia than our own. Regardless of who you are, where you live, what you believe– fauxstalgia is the name of the game. One could easily call it the other side of nostalgia, to the extent that the original term does not in itself contain an implication of the other. Regardless, the problem remains that the original contains just that– an implication– but nothing more. To my knowledge, a term to describe such a phenomena does not yet exist. Other terms, to describe longing for a past one never experienced, only go halfway, and never interrogate the past for which a person longs. That task, it seems, falls to me.
No one wants to live now, in 2021 (at time of writing). Let’s face it, 2021 sucks– there’s open police brutality against Black people, an ongoing pandemic, liberal democracies are failing us as new, corporatist hegemons emerge from the East to take their place, people are suffering from increasing rates of poverty, the natural environment is collapsing and no one powerful seems to care, billionaires continue to flaunt their wealth by flying people to space for fun as people are kicked off of unemployment benefits and child support, and that’s just off the top of my head.
The time you wax fauxstalgic for depends on your political affiliation, generally; for liberals, it’s usually the ‘90s or the Obama presidency; for conservatives, the Trump era or the ‘80s; fascists miss the ‘30s and civilizations gone for millennia; social democrats long for the days when Bernie and Corbyn were likely to win their respective elections or the post-war era when Keynesian economics reigned supreme; Marxist-Leninists romanticize the Lenin-Stalin premierships, Maoists add to that Mao’s reign over China, Trotskyists replace Stalin with Trotsky; Left communists, the German Revolution and conflicts in Italy; anarchists, the CNT-FAI and Makhnovia; for most contemporary PoMo or PoMo-adjacent thinkers, it’s May ‘68 and the Years of Lead– there’s always something for everyone, because this time has nothing for anyone.
This view of history, however, presents severely problematic trends for those who subscribe to some element of it. It is easy to take for granted certain benefits we have attained in the present, wretched thing though it is, and as a result a picture is painted of the past which conflicts blatantly from the actual society.
Take the classic example of fascists, who romanticize (among others) the Ancient Romans, for their wisdom, sexual purity, and powerful masculine heroism1. However, this is the epitome of fauxstalgia, in that they wish to “retvrn” to a past which never was, a time that never happened. Roman culture contained many permissions and practices of homosexuality, especially between men2.
“While a free Roman man was permitted to have sex with enslaved people, prostitutes, and infames, it was only acceptable if he took the dominant, or penetrative role…
Although not extensively documented, there were homosexual romantic relationships between Roman men. Most scholars agree that same sex relationships between men of the same class existed; however, because there were so many rigid social constructs applied to such relationship, they were kept private.
While same-sex marriage was not legally permitted, there are writings that indicate some men did participate in public ‘marriage ceremonies’ with other men; the emperor Nero did this at least twice, as did the emperor Elagabalus. In addition, at one point during his ongoing dispute with Mark Antony, Cicero attempted to discredit his opponent by claiming Antony had been given a stola by another man; the stola was the traditional garment worn by married women.”
Ancient Rome was the exact kind of “degeneracy” the fascists might rail against, but that isn’t important. For fauxstalgia, the longing is not for something which actually was, but something which they believe took place. This is a powerful tool– facts can prove something false, but they cannot change a person’s opinion on their own.
However, most fauxstalgia is not active denial, but convenient (and often intentional) ignorance or disavowal. When talking with a liberal who romanticizes the ‘90s, one can easily reference the incredibly violence against Black and Queer people at the time, the ecological catastrophes, the growing sense of precarity that enveloped the economy and the growing disillusionment of a cynical generation. To this, one will often receive a response of “Oh, of course that was awful, I’m not denying that, but that’s obviously not what I meant… or I meant the ‘90s without the [bad things] (wherein they take the culture but remove the terrible events)”.
The problem with this view is that it ignores the fact that every epoch is forged upon the bodies of those it oppresses, that every society is a necropolis founded upon the bodies of its victims. In order for a cishet white middle-class to sustain themselves, Queer, non-white (particularly Black), and poor people had to suffer. You cannot separate trauma and triumph. Liberalism is built upon a foundation of violence, death, and suffering– it cannot be extricated from it.
Lastly, the Left-wing response will be to say that they do not miss the suffering, quite the opposite– they miss the time when the people rose up and achieved success against exploitative powers, when Black people/Queer people/Feminists/Proletarians/Students/insert marginalized group here demanded better, and succeeded (or appeared as if they might succeed). This Left melancholia is nothing if not sick, perverted, twisted. I return again to Lyotard3:
“The young innocent Little Girl Marx says: you see, I am in love with love, this must stop, this industrial and industrious crap, this is what makes me anxious… She will have suffering growing before her and in her, because her prosecutor will discover in the course of his research, insofar as it is endless, a strange jouissance: the same jouissance that results from the instantiation of the pulsions and their discharge in postponement… the prosecutor charged with obtaining proof of the pornographic ignominy of capital repeats, in his enquiry and even in his preparation and pleading, this same 'Don't come yet' - so to speak - which is simply another modality of jouissance, which is found in the libidinal dispositif of capital.”
In this controversial text, Lyotard claims that Marx is at once horrified and enraptured by Capital, that he continued his critique because he could not bear to tear himself away from it. Regardless of the veracity of these claims, I think they are generally applicable to these desires to return to a Left-wing past.
After all, the Left can only exist in opposition, it can never exist in itself. To desire a powerful past Left movement must contain in itself the desire for the struggle, the desire to fight against a powerful enemy. The desire to return to and valorization of past struggles, rather than enact a movement of one’s own out of necessity, represents an additional, shameful, and sublimated desire for dominance, harm, subjugation. It must be an implicit and subconscious longing for the oppression of the time. The jouissance of resistance cannot exist without an external force against which to resist, which dooms any revolutionary movements which seek revenge or retribution to replicating the systems which oppress. If communism is a hammer we use to crush the enemies, what happens when the enemies are gone?
Seeing as I am not a fascist, this portrayal might misrepresent their views somewhat. If that is the case, I would advise them to cry about it and then go kill themselves.
The following quotation is from https://www.thoughtco.com/homosexuality-in-ancient-rome-4585065
From Libidinal Economy, written by Jean-Francois Lyotard and published in 1974. Text cited is from page 98-99, and the text is available online at https://monoskop.org/images/c/c4/Lyotard_Jean-Francois_Libidinal_Economy.pdf