Fused and Entangled: A Catalogue of Capitalist, Political, and Personal Nostalgia Perkins 2 “To offer them something and to withhold it is one and the same.” -Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment1 Whether it be resurrection after resurrection of intellectual property or modern political slogans, the amount of nostalgic sentiment in contemporary society is frequent and varied. This nostalgia ranges from blatant trickery to deeply personal expressions for the past. The title of this essay draws on an Amazon article that uses ‘fused’ and ‘entangled’ to describe its strategy of nostalgia marketing, which is surprisingly candid2. And, there is a paradox at hand. There is a separation between traditional art and popular entertainment, a divide which asks one to keep critical viewing skills confined to certain locations/ times. Meanwhile, separation is opposed by the fusing and entangling that the nostalgic image operates on. Nostalgic art ranges from kitsch to exceedingly personal. The goal of this paper is to reject and reimagine nostalgic media and art, its connections to capitalism and politics, and the transparent and subtle ways hegemonic values are weaved in all works of nostalgia. First, political and commercial ideas will be analyzed in contemporary visual culture. The key themes will then be applied to nostalgic posts on social media, which work in subtler and generationally specific ways, and finally in contemporary artworks. Nostalgia draws on invoking certain emotions in the viewer. This makes affect theory valuable in discovering how this feeling is utilized in visual culture. In her definition of affect, Ann Cvetkovich explains: “Accounts of psychic life and felt experience have been important to cultural studies in its efforts to explain the social and political uses of feeling… and to negotiate 2 Amazon Ads, "What is Nostalgia Marketing? Why is it Important?" Amazon Advertising, accessed March 16, 2025, https://advertising.amazon.com/library/guides/nostalgia-marketing. 1 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1999), 55. differences of scale between the local and the global, the intimate and the collective.”3 Cvetkovich raises key tensions and relationships involved within affect. Each thread fits nicely into nostalgic affect. First, the uses of affect have countless purposes in visual culture, from graphic design to popular culture to fine art, categories which often blend together. This means the use of nostalgic affect can be manipulated and used for dishonest reasons and in a variety of circumstances, including casually (invisibly). Additionally, nostalgia operates at both the intimate and collective levels, pointing to something deeply personal that draws on the comfort of collective experiences. Nostalgia often operates on the falsely personal, targeting a wide appeal in a sort of Nostalgic Funnel. Thus, these are important ranges to account for when engaging with any nostalgic image. The word nostalgia is often overused and can mean different things, so there have been attempts to categorize this emotion. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym defines two different types of nostalgia. She etymologically separates the word into nostos (return home) which points to restorative nostalgia and algia (pain) which relates to reflective nostalgia, which “dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance… reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.”4 Reflective nostalgia deals with emotions of yearning and pain. Bodily sensations such as crying and emotions of sadness and mourning are involved. Still, reflective nostalgia comes with an understanding of these memories as past, a past which is acknowledged to be flawed. Art and media that invoke reflective nostalgia often make their aims clear and are found in more critical spaces, like museums. 4 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 41. 3 Ann Cvetkovich, Bruce Burgett, and Glenn Hendler, “Affect,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 14. Visual images can also push for the opposite, called restorative nostalgia. For Boym, “restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps… they believe that their project is about truth… by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past.”5 Restorative nostalgics seek bringing past structures or ideas into the present, connecting with feelings of nationalism, idealism, and determination. Restorative nostalgia draws on these emotions, and may be reacted to more actively. We can see restorative nostalgia in right-wing politics, evident in the contemporary political slogans Make America Great Again and Take Back Control. The belief of truth presents itself in Truth Social, a conservative social media. Still, although these categories are helpful, it is important to reflect on the gray area of this binary; the word nostalgia is made up of return home and pain. Figure 1. Andy Thomas, The Democrat Club, 2019, oil on canvas, size varies. Andy Thomas, The Republican Club, 2019, oil on canvas, size varies. Looking at a specific example of an artwork, we can find elements of restorative nostalgia within the formal elements of Andy Thomas’ work. In The Republican Club and The Democrat Club, Thomas takes several infamous presidents and creates imagined encounters with contemporary presidents, in this case Donald Trump and Barack Obama (fig. 1 and 2). Each 5 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 41. painting’s tone is cheery and friendly, with warm colors and impressionist brushstrokes surrounding the realistic presidential figures. Compositionally, the two images are very similar; The gazes of the recognizable faces create triangular movement from one face to the next, creating a connected web between the historical figures, further emphasizing their chumminess. Visual images and media often entail more than one emotion, which creates a sort of story. For Sara Ahmed, affect involves a narrative progression: “The replacement of one word for an emotion with another word produces a narrative. Our love might create the condition for our grief, our loss could become the condition for our hate, and so on… for example, others might get read as the ‘reason’ for the loss of the object of love, a reading which easily converts feelings of grief into feelings of hate.”6 With nostalgia, this procession of emotions can be damaging. Seeing something you loved in the past can transform into negative emotions which affect others. It is important to see the thread between restorative nostalgia and narratives, as Boym points out how ‘myth,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘conspiracy theories’ make their way into narrative production. What emotions do homesickness and pain produce? What narrative does this create? The images point to the use of nostalgia in creating a certain story surrounding these figures, political parties, and the past. The paintings create connections and an imagined common ground for each respective political party, even though the members span policies, decades, and centuries. But even beyond binary political affiliation, the images reflect a constructed narrative of the history of the United States and a prosperous past for only certain people. These images hold a sentimental danger. For restorative nostalgists, the fact that all but one of the figures is a white man may point to some type of ‘truth’ of who should hold power, or they might see a correlation between ‘simpler times’ and the demographic in charge. The figures directly outside 6 Sara Ahmed, “Introduction: Feel Your Way,” in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, NED-New edition, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 13. Perkins 6 of the main group consist of other party presidents. Thomas has chosen which presidents to include at the main table and which are in the background, establishing the most important figures. The woman in the background is supposed to account for the imbalance of genders in the image. Still, this idea is not guaranteed to come across to the viewer7. One of the most troubling elements in the compositions is Andrew Jackson. Why is Jackson even in this sentimental image? No one alive today was even alive for his presidency. How does this play into the affect of the image? Displaying him in an equal light as the others and celebrating him without critique hides atrocities of his presidency. Jackson was pro-slavery and forcibly removed Native Americans from their land, resulting in the Trail of Tears8. Not opening up these key figures to critical conversation perpetuates is misleading and quells the need to challenge and rewrite narratives.9 Not only does it evoke a period of childhood, but reflects a desire for community through a common narrative and history – one that’s uncomplicated and agreed upon. Again, this simplification neglects complexities, incongruities, and problematic elements from being properly addressed. Evasion of critical thinking environments is also found in commercial nostalgia. Shining examples of popular visual nostalgia are evident in the current of legacy remakes and reboots in Hollywood. For Ryan Lizardi, remakes “create and maintain individualized media connections to the past by defining the parameters of history with the postmodern homage” and the remake “collides the present with the past by refashioning and ‘remaking’ these divergent texts together in a manner that avoids the radical or the comparative.”10 Watching a remake engages with past memories, but only at a second degree, it avoids actually revisiting the original nostalgic artifact 10 Ryan Lizardi, Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media, 1st ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 116. 9 This may connect to where these figures are often seen together: history classes in primary and secondary school. 8 Cohn, Douglas Alan. “Andrew Jackson – Trail of Tears 1829–1837.” In The President’s First Year. (United States: Globe Pequot Press, The, 2016), 99. 7Stuart Hall’s Encoding and Decoding is apt here for further study. Perkins 7 in the first place. This is a way of ‘refashioning’ and avoiding critical encounters with an original, which may be outdated, problematic, or live up to an impossible standard. It is a kind of death when one reengages with the past, and it is cheap and ineffective – a media version of Schodiner’s cat. We can see how other uses of nostalgia, such as the Andy Thomas paintings, strategically shield themselves from the ‘radical’, evident in the ‘refashioning’ of the painting for each political party, avoiding picking a side or comparing. Even the compositions are practically identical. Ultimately, remakes, formulas, and nostalgia avoid critical encounters with artifacts and the past in which they existed. Figure 2. Lilo & Stitch, poster, 2025, 27 x 40 in., promotional poster for Lilo & Stitch, directed by Dean Fleischer Camp (Walt Disney Studios) The recent remake of Lilo and Stitch is emblematic of the ideas Lixardi brings up. The poster not only hinges on the memories of other films, but memories of the past and childhood. It reflects the original’s marketing campaign, which included a range of other Disney characters. Perkins 8 The poster illustrates a complete collapse and implosion of popular properties and logos, evident in the lightsaber, genie lamp, rose, Pixar ball, and Mickey Mouse hat all residing in one image, many of which are literally damaged, a literal and figurative collapse and destruction of the past. The gray setting only makes these individual items pop even more, giving the colorful logos and objects a greater comfort. It almost comes to function as a challenge, seeing how many references you can recognize. The naturalism of the objects becomes tangible, enticing the viewer more with their textures and realism. These past stories and accomplishments point to a promise of the remake’s quality, and Funnel a wide range of potential ticket-payers together with things that aren’t even in the film. Surely one of these familiar images will get you to see the movie! Remakes reflect a greater system of capitalist structures that restrain and trap the public. Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of the culture industry is especially pertinent in conversation with recent surges of remakes: The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape.11 For these thinkers, cultural production involves temporary and unfulfilled distractions from failures in capitalist society in order to keep the working class satisfied. Connecting with nostalgia, we are shown ideas, images, and memories that are not actually possible to return to. Entertainment distracts. This reflects the way franchises are often ‘endlessly’ returned to and revamped, working as ‘brilliant names’ that are eye-catching and disguise greed and exploitation of hegemonic powers. The brands and logos of the Lilo and Stitch poster are emblematic of this. 11Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” 38. Perkins 9 The promise of returning to the past is deliberately deceitful, manipulative, and lucrative. What does it say that capitalist entities are signaling to a time that is impossible to truly return to? What are we missing when we look back? More implicitly, media confronts relationships with fragmentation and the local community. Boym argues: “Somehow progress didn't cure nostalgia but exacerbated it… in counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace and the virtual global village, there is a no less global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world. Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.”12 Technology and cyberspace disunite the way we engage with entertainment — they can be watched at any time, anywhere. As opposed to live TV, streaming services and social media operate on a personal clock. Either locally in a movie theater or community discourse, remakes offer resurgences and scheduled times where memories are revisited on a larger group scale. Thus, the promise of a communal experience is affectively powerful. Boym’s use of the phrase ‘defense mechanism’ illustrates her view of the severity and the bodily, effective way we yearn for collective recollection. Entertainment becomes a time to relax and often to avoid hard work and contemporary fears and problems. Hard work which includes constant visual examination.13 Corporations take advantage of this aching. One can look to Amazon’s advertising guides to see the corporate intentions of nostalgia marketing, citing different “ways to fuse nostalgia into your marketing strategy.”14 The article explains the affect of nostalgia on the consumer: “These emotions create powerful associations with the brand or product being marketed, fostering brand loyalty and brand preference. This approach also helps bring consumers together 14 Amazon Ads, “What is Nostalgia Marketing?” 13 Again, the culture industry is very applicable. 12 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, XIV. Perkins 10 around a shared experience, making the brand a commonality, entangled with the positive association to nostalgia.”15 The usage of the verbs ‘fuse’ and ‘entangled’ make it clear that the association of nostalgic memories and commercial products is intentional and exploited. We can think about the etymological connection between ‘fuse’ and ‘confuse,’ blending these elements together in a way that is meant to disorient. Social media offers another vehicle where casual entertainment intermingles with deep yearning and the past in a more invisible way. Although social media seems less malicious and present than the political and commercial use of affect, Benjamin Jacobsen and David Beer coin qualitative nostalgia to describe the systems that undergird social media. They argue “this is an economy capitalizing on people’s participation on a platform, turning it into relational value and ‘likes.’ People’s engagements with their memories on social media platforms are similarly turned into relational value, something that can be liked or ignored by others, something that can become visible or made invisible.”16 The authors extend a capitalist metaphor to something that seems distant, displaying the similarities of harm between the two structures. Within social media itself, popularity can change our views of what we see. Since communal experience is so important in nostalgia, observing that millions of others relate and react to the same thing you do is affectively powerful. Social media then becomes an active way to engage in community, but also engages with more passive interactions with unseen forces. 16 Benjamin N. Jacobsen and David Beer, “Quantified Nostalgia: Social Media, Metrics, and Memory,” Social Media + Society 7, no. 2 (2021). 15 Ibid. Perkins 11 Figure 3. Stills from TikTok video by @wanna.be.a.kid.again, 2025. The TikTok illustrates a common template and elements within social media nostalgia (fig. 3). The video quickly flips through dozens of images, accompanied by somber music and the reverberant voice of a child. The passing images mirror fleeting memories and work together to briefly reconstruct the tastes, smells, settings, and activities of the 2000s. Additionally, having the images rapidly progress creates a sense of movement – conceiving a sense of life that is hastily taken away. Importantly, there is an absence of any people in these photographs, allowing one to imagine themselves in these spaces. The video can be seen through the lens of restorative and reflective nostalgia. It is reflective in the way no one is present in the images, illustrating the artificiality and absence. There is an impossibility of returning. The brief interaction with the video does, however, temporarily engage in the communal. Still, it is likely these videos make some sort of impact, whether it be unconscious resistance to change or sadness within the structure of the status quo. For restoratives, these settings and images (which includes many brands) become mythologized, and narratives of excluding those who don’t share the same past or villainizing of people who, they believe, threatened and destroyed it. The text creates a narrative. The ‘we’ creates a Perkins 12 grouping, which then establishes an other. Who are ‘we’? Who falls outside of this grouping? Whose childhood didn’t look like this? Who/ what changed our insouciance? Figure 4. Stills from TikTok video by @kelilingbarengangga_, 2024. These posts can also deal with the past in more inconspicuous ways, even reflecting current displeasure with the present. The images are from a TikTok slideshow, each with images of crescendoing happiness as the user swipes from 2024 to 2015 (fig. 4). Although the post seems goofy and harmless, is there not something deeply troubling about happiness being associated with retrospection and backtracking?17 What about growing displeasure and pessimism in the future? The use of the cartoon character Squidward and TikTok format are emblematic of deeper issues of longing and memory, using unserious imagery to mourn the past. Again, a sort of generational division is created with a cartoon that is specific to only some childhoods. A visual narrative is created, like a picture book, as emotions convert from sadness to happiness. As opposed to the TikTok, there is less melancholy and more anger that results, partially mirroring the grumpiness of the character (fig. 4). Still, there is a massive generality that the image works on. Anyone who sees this can relate, imagining the specific years and past for themselves. There are altered examples of the same format just shifted a few years. Nostalgia is an endlessly repeating cycle. 17 As well as growing nostalgia for the quarantine years. Perkins 13 Figure 5. Sayre Gomez, Spiritual America, 2021, 48 x 175 in, acrylic on aluminium composite material. It may be helpful to look at some contemporary artworks, which offer different visual settings than previous examples. In Spiritual America, artist Sayre Gomez explores the idea of late capitalism, the past, and change. As opposed to the previous examples of nostalgic images, the museum location of Gomez’s work eliminates the busy and passive intake of online content. Additionally, the work is minimal and conceptual, not specifying exactly what it wants the viewer to think. The work is not surrounded by likes, discourse, or distractions. With the two logos, we are confronted by seeing popular imagery/ brands in a critical space, forced to acknowledge and dwell in affect of the image. The piece draws on the bankruptcy of Toys R Us and the prevalence of pop-up shops in the place of past stores. The work plays on the ‘death’ of brand names, literally haunting the abandoned and failed location, much in the way nostalgia is haunting and lasting. The bright colors of the Halloween City sign contrast the washed out and withered pallet of the subsurface sign. The pumpkin is sinister yet playful and reminds one of the transitory passing of time, acknowledging what is temporary. Still, there is something hopeful about the work with the invocation of Halloween which is a repetitive event, returning every year. Additionally, there is Perkins 14 something slightly more local about pop-up shops – the structure and location of the building are recognized. Still, the viewer is forced to imagine and construct a building, as the sign is disconnected from any one specific location. To me, dead buildings and malls create a deep feeling of loss and desire for a lively community, so the revitalization of the empty space communicates feelings of hope. Although this still celebrates consumerism, it is important to reflect on the discrepancies and contradictions of finding joy in things bound in commerce. Figure 6. Kayla Mahaffery, Unwind, 2020, Acrylic and Spray Paint on wood, 18 x 24. Other reflective works of nostalgia reject the specific. In Kayla Mahaffery’s work, Unwind, a child is depicted within an imaginative and colorful environment, filled with cartoonish characters and references to youth. These forms range from pixelated tools, a disembodied cartoon hand, and amorphous clouds. In this way, there are similar elements to the Lilo & Stitch poster: a central figure surrounded by damaged objects of the past. Still, the image is not a celebration of restorative nostalgia. Instead of specific characters or brands, references to nostalgia are abstracted, allowing one to detach themselves and view with critical distance. The Perkins 15 figure’s apprehensive expression contrasts the joyful, abstracted setting, and the shapes emerging from the head seem harmless until one notices the crack forming on the side of his face, adding a specificity to the image and adding a critical affect to the image. The image acts as a reaction to the overload of images, symbols, and references faced by youth – culminating in exhaustion and alienation. What is at stake when memories of childhood, the past, and home are taken into capitalist hands? In Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Stuart Hall describes nostalgia for home and its relation to story: “Who has not known, at this moment, the surge of an overwhelming nostalgia for lost origins, for ‘times past’? And yet, this ‘return to the beginning’ is like the imaginary in Lacan - it can neither be fulfilled nor requited, and hence is the beginning of the symbolic, of representation, the infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, search, discovery - in short, the reservoir of our cinematic narratives.”18 We can see this sentiment of the infinite and impossible quality of nostalgia in Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry. Hegemonic uses of nostalgia manipulate and interfere with our sources of ‘desire, memory, myth’ and ultimately the ‘reservoir’ in which we create and imagine stories and ideas. Thus, employing strategies that may manipulate, combine, or standardize (deradicalize) our pasts, or use them for profit or other gains, is evident in visual nostalgic culture. What’s at stake is our stories, imagination, art, creation, and ultimately our power. These nostalgic stories and feelings evidently emerge in every possible form. In Marshall McCluhan’s famous essay “The Medium is the Message,” he argues the importance in analyzing how the medium which something exists in changes how we interact with it: “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a 18 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Transatlantic Literary Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 236. Perkins 16 bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.”19 In this case, the medium of social media and TikTok fragments are very individual experiences. Thinking about how social media, museums, commercials, movies, political images, etc. are different based on the form and medium they take is essential in deconstructing meaning and intentions. One of my intentions with this paper is to quickly survey some of these mediums and how nostalgia is approached, if it succeeds or fails, and whether there is a best medium for it. Ultimately, the techniques used to create nostalgic affect are present within every medium of visual culture (film, visual art, social media…). Strict separation between art history and mass popular culture keeps important critical and theoretical ideas confined to certain spaces and contexts (compartmentalization), leaving flawed visual culture in a perfunctory state. We are so overloaded with all types of images with all types of intentions, similar to the jumbled and quick nature of visual examples in this paper. Capitalism and political campaigns benefit off grieving and suffering, of a yearning for the past – an idealized yet impossible and incomplete past. So, what motivation is there to change structural issues and create a more enjoyable present and future? And how do we do the work of the hegemony through, looking back at the quote that started the paper (do you remember it?), offering and depriving ourselves of experiences and memories? The swift and busy flow of this essay in some ways mirrors the way I think as I approach visual culture, the stream of thought as I face the daily barrage of different images – images are not clear cut or smooth. I hope these numerous hurried ideas act as threads and branches for you to confront nostalgic images that comfort, connect, and challenge you. 19 McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2001), 1. Perkins 17 Bibliography Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd Edition, Simon During, ed. New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 31-41. Ahmed, Sara. “Introduction: Feel Your Way.” In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, NED-New edition, 2., 1–19. 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Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media. 1st ed. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. “The Medium Is the Message.” Corte Madera, CA: Perkins 18 Gingko Press, 2001.