by Tom Pazderka
All revolutions have the (un)fortunate side effect of altering much more than what they’ve initially set out to change. Whether we’re talking about a political act or a scientific breakthrough, a revolution begins with a magical act. What was previously seen as impossible, in a moment, is overcome. Spontaneous outbursts of mass movements (often accompanied by violence) cause major political upheavals, innovations in science and medicine cause humans to live longer or reach other planets, while artistic revolutions cause us to perceive and see in radically different ways. Revolutionary moments happen quickly. But their aftereffects can be felt for many years.
The second magical act occurs within historical hindsight, when revolutions morph into predetermined events that were always about to happen. A strange phenomenon is thus produced. A revolution changes not just the present order of things and all future outcomes, but through the third and final magical act, the revolutionary moment also changes everything that led up to its moment of realization, including itself. History becomes liquid and phenomena fall prey to object impermanence. The past becomes nothing more than a projection screen for the neuroses and pathologies of the present. What is true today is usually false tomorrow. Nothing can stand upright in the quicksand of revolution.
Metaphysically, revolutions are a combination and product of calculated necessity and Faustian bargains, whose symptom takes the form of nostalgia. The profound anti-historicism of nostalgia acts as a countermeasure to the liquid conditions of volatile times. It’s also a coping mechanism for dealing with the aftermath of the failures of the cold (ir)rationality of revolutions. The permanent revolution of technological innovation collapses time into incoherent and countless instances, most of which do not align with one another and provide not only an inaccurate version of events, like a copy of a copy of a copy, but an entirely fabricated alternate reality.
“The past has never been so close to the future, to the point where we cannot help but doubt whether the modern age was nothing more than one long dream: the Promised Land, peaceful and skillfully governed by cybernetics, is turning into a cybergothic nightmare marred by conflict, bigotry, and superstition. Indeed, across the globe, reactionary movements are calling for the end of modernity and a return to various prior configurations.” — Revolutionary Demonology, p. 83
Mapping Failure
At the core of revolutionary nostalgia is the operative nature of failure. The fundamental ontological principle of revolution is always a referendum upon the existing order of which the prior revolution was one of the major building blocks. Failure is thus the ontological event from which all revolution proceeds and expands. By extension, failure is thus always present and included as part of the new order. As a result revolution leaves the present, the future and the past ontologically incomplete, always subject to new reinterpretation and to the possibility of inclusion within a fundamentally new alternate reality, often running parallel to the actually existing reality.
The human condition is subject to the functioning of the revolutionary process as a necessary component of change. Without change, the human condition stagnates and worse, deteriorates. Political, social, scientific and artistic revolutions inaugurate changes to the existing paradigm by solving problems that previous revolutions caused. In politics, the aim of revolution is to change and replace existing institutions, while in science and art, revolutions aim to assert a new paradigm to which prior revolutions have led the way. The failure of revolutions at crucial stages owes its existence to how revolutions aim to change the structures and paradigms of institutions in ways that those same institutions prohibit. This creates the space for inevitable failure. It is difficult to not fall into the metaphysical trap of predestination, but that is precisely what the advent of change and revolution signifies.
Nostalgia enters into this logically circular system as a symptom. It attempts to fill in the gaps left over from the moment before failure entered into the system. But because failure is an ontologically implicit part of the revolutionary system, the symptom of nostalgia cannot be effectively exorcised and so it remains one of the major building blocks of the symbolic order post revolution.
Among the many functions of nostalgia is the ideological restoration of the lost cause or prior state, in other words, a revolution in reverse, a move backward not just in time, but in memory. Failure is therefore rearticulated in many guises in the present as a kind referendum or shield against the flow of historical phenomena. Many well-known large scale rebellions and revolutionary failures exist as potential sources of reanimated agency and tend to be hot topics of debate decades, even centuries, after their original energy had been depleted.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the events of the revolutions of 1848 which revealed Marxism to be its preeminent symptom of revolutionary nostalgia. The Spanish Civil War did the same for Anarchism and 1989 did so for Communism. The same revolutionary nostalgia exists on the more conservative spectrum as well. What the American Revolutionary War did for nationalism, the Industrial Revolution did for capitalism, and in the minds of many Western nations, 1989 was seen as a referendum on the Cold War, inaugurating the nostalgic reanimation of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies.
