Well before nostalgia underwent its etymological shift and became the yearning for a period instead of a place, the concept of time itself had changed, Becker writes, from being mostly a respect for the past to a faith in the future, one that would be a great long march through “continual improvement.” Modern debates over the importance of preserving the built environment, nostalgia’s physical warehouse, have pitted this persistent sense of progress against a more recent one, “in which past and present intersected and overlapped, as they often do in the material fabric of a city.” According to Becker, “presentism”—not just the imposition of current values onto the past but any exclusive preoccupation with the here and now—has become nearly “as much a term of abuse as nostalgia.” He supports a dual consciousness of both past and present called “pluritemporality,” a German theorist’s coinage that one can only hope is never again uttered by anyone’s tongue or keyboard.
Even so, as faith in the future now enters a sort of planetary free fall, it seems less and less disputable that past and present are beginning to blend, as if the latter needed a frequent assist from the former. There is also no denying a new retro-seeking speed (the eighties had been pop-culturally revived before the mid-nineties were even over) and no avoiding how different past eras have begun simultaneously to flicker in the collective imagination, coming and going with little regard for sequence, context, or sense. Simon Reynolds, approvingly quoted by Becker, speaks of our “putting history into shuffle mode,” thanks to the lily-pad linkages of the Web and the everything-available-all-at-once nudgings of YouTube. Much as the pocket calculator long ago caused arithmetic skills to atrophy, newer technologies have made history ubiquitous instead of chronological, let alone explanatory. Mashups are now constructed with no real deliberateness but as part of a steady acquisitive spree through the videos that crowd our screens. We doomscroll and catastrophize and feel a Yeatsian certainty that we’ve reached the point where “things fall apart,” while history itself congeals into its own gluey casserole. To take a trivial, innocent example: How many young viewers of “Grease” understand that the film is in fact a backward glance from five decades ago to seven?