Subtitled “The Politics of Nostalgia”, Tanner’s book is divided into three sections, of which I found the first to be the most interesting: this is where Tanner unearths the history of nostalgia as a diagnosis (broadly medical before becoming more specifically psychological) which was literally lethal in its earliest manifestations among soldiers of the Napoleonic wars: quite how people died of nostalgia is unclear, but it apparently appeared on a lot of death certificates. (Tanner does not speculate, but I was led to wonder if this was a military euphemism for suicide, or for capital punishment in the face of insurrection or “cowardice”, or perhaps even a mixture of both.) Tanner’s account ties the emergence of nostalgia firstly to the dislocation of humans in space, later followed (or perhaps more accurately compounded) by dislocation in time, as such relocations and displacements became more commonplace among the working and soldiering classes, and of course among enslaved people. Being compelled to move against one’s will seems to be a big part of it, and that restless rotlessness carries through into the nostalgia of the neoliberal subject of today. Interestingly, once activated, nostalgia frequently reverses its valence: soldiering again provides the obvious example, with troops being first nostalgic for home when on a tour of duty, but then frequently becoming nostalgic for the service once finally home again: the conditioning required to make a good soldier, the discipline and institutionalisation of military life, becomes an alternative or replacement home, a structure of comfort… or at least of familiarity, perhaps. This problem becomes more pronounced as the accelerating pace of change under capitalism ramps up: “home” becomes an ever-more Heraclitian category, a river one can never step into twice.

There’s also a long engagement with Auge’s notion of the “non-place”: these are nostalgia-provoking by design, partly due to their having stripped away the “nature” of a site in the name of Virilio-esque values of speed and passage, and partly due to their replacement of that “nature” with a simplified veneer of supposedly comforting semiotics whose uncanny artificiality merely amplifies the nostalgic vibes by reminding the subject of what has been removed, if only in some cases by emphasising its absence and the transience of the resulting environment (shades of Joni Mitchell, here). This is quite deliberate, too, if not necessarily fully conscious: as Tanner notes, nostalgia has been well studied, and the results of that research much seized upon as a way of selling products and political programmes alike. We should perhaps be grateful that nostalgia has become so normalised and ubiquitous, if only because it no longer has that lethal quality of its earliest manifestations, changing perhaps like an infection whose tendency to kill the host decreases under evolutionary pressures. But its context is also adapting, of course, and (post)modern capitalism has absorbed and re-operationalised the conditioning paradigm of military training and the production of non-places and deployed them at an environmental scale. The annihilation of space by time, as Marx put it—his passing grasp at a theory of media, or at least of infrastructure, before those concepts had really emerged—to be followed by the annihilation of temporality by the standardisation and quantification of (clock) time, followed in turn by the annihilation of continuity—of “home”—by the relentless ubiquity of commodification and change; this genealogy (which, to be clear, I am extracting and extrapolating from Tanner’s account, or perhaps imposing upon it) shows nostalgia to have developed alongside what I refer to as the infrastructural metasystem, first manifesting in a way we can trace through the early phases of the so-called Enlightenment.

To reiterate, Tanner does not make this infrastructural connection explicitly, but the elements required for the argument are easily gathered here, particularly given my long-standing ideas about the effacement of the consequences of human action by infrastructural means, and the maturing of that phenomenon into the veil of the Spectacle (as initially theorised by Guy Debord). That media—which might be thought of as the surface layer of the infrastructural metasystem, the layer that is interposed between the human gaze and that which we have come to think of as “nature”—are niche environments for nostalgia is an easy sell, and as such Tanner’s middle section (which mixes a whistle-stop tour of media criticism and ecology with a grab-bag of illustrative examples drawn from our social-media-saturated present) was less revelatory to me, as well as feeling anecdotal at best (and obvious at worst). That said, one might see this as the content of the critique being replicated at the level of form: the incoherence—and, yes, nostalgia—of this section, drawing heavily on the experience of Tanner and his own generation (marketeers would categorise him very much in the late Millennial bracket) represents the inchoate longing and atemporality that are correlative with (though not necessarily caused by, nor causal of) the nostalgia complex he’s trying to address. Likewise the books’ latter section, whose focus on nostalgia’s relation to climate change and eco-anxiety is no news to someoen who has spent rather more time than may be healthy engaging with the relevant literatures—though this might be of much greater value to someone who has not already spent a decade wading around and looking for ways through that particular slough of despond.

Tanner’s conclusion is worth noting, though, in that he refuses to simply condemn nostalgia as a tool of reactionary leverage. Throughout the book—more successfully in some parts than others—he works to show that nostalgia has a rational and justified quality, and that it serves functions of adaption and change such as grieving, and dreaming of change for the better: thus, Tanner argues, it should be part of any leftist project that tries to face down the total(ising) transformation of the world by capital. The point is valid, I think, though it feels a little weak in the wake of the far vaster evidence for nostalgia as a weaponised emotional response, a button to be repeatedly and cynically mashed by the dark narratologists of marketing and public relations; making “good” use of it would require a deftness with and control of the media (and of the infrastructure upon which those media run) which is the generative soil and distributive matrix of reaction and numb consumption.

But perhaps there’s some hope to be taken from the curve of normalisation, and in the unreliability of marketing and PR techniques, to which it has been argued (convincingly, for me at least) we develop a certain resistance with excessive exposure: the contest of narratives is not completely separable from the actuality in which (and over which) it plays out, and perhaps we approach—or have already passed?—a point where the Spectacle is stretched so thin as to rip and tear easily. But then, as tanner suggests, the challenge is to use nostalgia not to orient people toward irretrievable edenic pasts—i.e. the conservative modality of the utopian impulse—but rather toward past actions of resistance which retain a critical-utopian orientation: a nostalgia for the struggle for a better world, rather than for that which has already been lost.