I often feel nostalgic, sometimes for a past I’ve never experienced. I am nostalgic for a world where the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is less than 405 parts per million, for instance. I’m nostalgic for a world when southern Saskatchewan was still grassland, a time before settlers arrived (which would mean that, as a descendant of settlers, I would be somewhere else, or perhaps nowhere, but I honestly don’t care about that). I don’t imagine that in the future the concentration of carbon will be less than 405 parts per million, or that this province will have any more than 13.7 percent of its original grassland ecosystem intact, so I imagine the kind of past I’d like to see. I’m not the only one who feels that way. I remember a passage in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (I think it was The Road to Wigan Pier) measuring a happy working-class home in the 1930s against a similar home in the modern future, and Orwell deciding that the present, when there was work and food and decent housing–all things that, as his book demonstrates, manifestly did not exist in the UK of the 1930s–would be better than what was coming. But at the same time, I know that nostalgia is a vehicle for right-wing fantasies of white supremacy and empire. That’s what those MAGA hats are about, right? A malignant and racist nostalgia—and I’m not attacking Americans here, either; there are enough white supremacists right here, some of them working for one of our major political parties. My point is that nostalgia is slippery and dangerous–and yet, I am very familiar with its call.

So Alastair Bonnett’s essay, “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography,” speaks directly to me, and his bibliography suggests lots of further reading on the topic of nostalgia’s place within radical political and aesthetic practices. Bonnett begins with Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital, one of his central examples, a book which, he writes, depicts “a journey in and against the contemporary landscape” and “an act of retrieval of radical histories now by-passed,” but also “a kind of romantic tribute to the brute energy of a technocratic, dehumanized environment” (46). That book is, for Bonnett, also an example of the “psychogeographical turn” in British literary culture and avant-garde activity (46). It is a work that “seeks to re-enchant and re-mythologize prosaic geographies. The resultant effect is disorientating—funny yet melancholic; utterly of our time but ill at ease with modern Britain” (46). In a review of London Orbital, Robert Macfarlane described it as “nostalgic radicalism” (qtd. in Bonnett 46), highlighting what Bonnett sees as its ambivalence, “the unresolved nature of his project” (46). Bonnett’s purpose is to develop this interpretation and to argue “that contemporary British psychoeography should be understood as a site of struggle over the politics of loss within the radical imagination,” and more specifically “that British psychogeography is an arena of conflict between two important strands within British radicalism: the use of the past to critique industrian modernity and the suppression of nostalgia” (46). “[T]hese tendencies, though they remain discordant presences, are, in fact, partially resolved into novel forms of creative praxis,” he writes (46).

Bonnett’s essay has three sections: first, the historical context of “the emergence of nostalgia as a dilemma within political radicalism,” and the second and third examples of British psychogeography—one devoted to Iain Sinclair’s work, and the other to the various psychogeographical groups which sprung up in the 1990s in the UK (47). Both share “a quixotic, love-hate relationship with the past,” exhibiting “an uneasy combination of deracinating modernism and folksy localism,” but both are distinctive in “their fraught relationship with nostalgia” (47). “Within Sinclair’s travel books, the modern landscape becomes a site of creative purgatory,” Bonnett writes. “Britain’s auto-centric, disorienting non-places seem to have for him the fascinating, troubling allure of a kind of necessary violence, a violence that simultaneously anchors the writer in modernism while establishing marginal spaces and histories discovered on foot as sanctuaries that tell of profound cultural and social loss” (47). In what he calls “revolutionary psychogeography,” on the other hand, the simultaneous refusal and deployment of nostalgia 

is enacted in a different way and to different ends. The use of a self-consciously exaggerated and, hence, self-subverting rhetoric of class war enabled these activists to evoke and ironize orthodox revolutionary politics. The development within this resolutely ‘underground’ community of so-called ‘magico-Marxism’ encapsulates the novelty but also the folk-historical inclinations of their project. (48)

For Bonnett, “a newly confident politics of nostalgia can be glimpsed within this milieu: at the counter-cultural margins of society radicalism is (once again) becoming tied to a popular politics of loss” (48). 

This discussion is part of a larger debate about the relationship between radicalism and “the politics of loss,” Bonnett writes (48):

Politics demands the critique of the present and, hence, the necessity of political visions of the past and/or future. Yet within an era that distinguishes itself by its modernity, these are not equivalent options. to be “backward looking” is unacceptable, inadequate, eccentric. . . . However, while we should acknowledge that a yearning for and an attachment to the past is inherently discordant in the modern world, it appears that the relationship between nostalgia and radicalism is uniquely troublesome. “Making a new world” is a defining or, at least, central claim of the radical imagination. (48-49)

“The landscape has been the central stage for the proof and spectacle of radical transformation,” Bonnett continues. “The eradication of old buildings, old place names and old monuments, and the construction of new places, new names and new monuments, provided the most visible symbols of revolutionary intent. This eagerness to build anew was never simply a mere concretization of radical ideology. It was also an assertion of authority over the past” (49). So, by the middle of the 20th century, “the idea that radicals are necessarily suspicious of the past had become so dominant that, across the range of radical opinion—from authoritarian to libertarian—feelings of loss and regret were cast as intrinsically wrong,” and looking back has been seen as wrong-headed (49). Regret about the past leads to resignation about the present and, therefore, political quietism, according to Richard Sennett, a claim Bonnett suggests “bears little scrutiny” and “has the brazen, generalizing quality of a stereotype” (49). Nostalgia therefore came to be seen as “an alien presence” within radicalism (49). 

“However, it is only by addressing the use and subsequent repression of nostalgia in the broader radical movement that we can begin to understand how and why the unresolved problem of the past is played out within contemporary psychogeography,” Bonnett argues (49). Attachments to the past were once central to popular radicalism, but after the late 19th century “such attachments became marginalized and, hence, available to an emergent avant-garde as a resource for cultural transgression” (49). Nevertheless, the relationship between the avant-garde and nostalgia always uneasy: “The way in which the avant-garde imagined and recuperated aspects of the past as pre-bourgeois and pre-civilized is indicative of how it has managed the paradoxes of modernist nostalgia” (50). In fact, he suggests, “[t]he attachment to the land and to myths of traditional community that are so central to late 18th-century and early and mid-19th-century English revolutionary thought have been consistently underplayed” (50). The sense of loss experienced by those early radicals was not just related to “ancient landscapes” but also to “traditional and communal relationships to the landscape” (50). “Whether expressed through romantic or practical historical comparison, resistance to the transformation of ‘our places’ into things owned and traded by an alien class was central to the emotional and political message of early radicalism,” Bonnett writes (50). However, as scientific socialism became pervasive, “such backward-looking perspectives took on an increasingly self-conscious and risky quality” (50). Nostalgia came to acquire “defensive and disruptive connotations” (51), and “resistance to industrial civilization” came to be seen as “arcane and conservative” (51). 

“As hostility to nostalgia developed into a radical orthodoxy, the past became more attractive to the unorthodox,” Bonnett writes. “Hence, one of the consequences of the opprobrium that came to surround the topic was that the past came to take on forbidden connotations and acquired transgressive qualities (especially when cast in the form of the ‘primitive’ and pre-civilized) that attracted the avant-garde” (51). While “[t]he avant-garde have continued to work through the dilemmas and opportunities of radical nostalgia,” though, “an attraction to the past triggers automatic suspicion” (52). For instance, the attempts by the Surrealists and Situationists to “cast the street as a terrain of intimacy and creativity, a space hidden and threatened by the ‘suppression of the street’ augured by modern traffic and modern planning,” might “have had ‘elitist’ components,” with elitism being one of the suspicions modernity has about nostalgia, but “it must also be understood as an attempt to defend ‘popular’ or ordinary space within and from the new technocentric and exclusionary landscapes of modernity” (52). “Nostalgia cannot be adequately summarized as either elitist or popularist,” Bonnett continues. “Indeed, it often acts to confound and confuse such designations and, by extension, the ability of ‘melancholic intellectuals’ ever to be entirely ‘at home’ within either modernity or anti-modernity” (51). For example, “radicalism and nostalgia were most clearly drawn together within the often uneasy combination of anti-technocratic pastoralism and avant-garde experimentalism found within the hippie and bohemian arts scenes of the 1960s and 1970s” (52). In addition, “nostalgia has had a somewhat mercurial presence within theorizations of postmodernism” which is often overlooked: one example is Wendy Wheeler’s 1994 essay “Nostalgia Isn’t Nasty,” which argued that nostalgia is a central feature of postmodernism (53). Nevertheless, nostalgia never became a central theme in postmodern discourse: 

it has been stereotyped by both postmodernists and Marxists as a sign of failure and conservatism. By approaching nostalgia through political history it becomes easier to see that any attempt to classify it as a symptom of postmodernism (or, indeed, of late modern Marxism) is unlikely to be satisfying. The politics of loss are chained to the politics of modernity. This also implies that the possibility of nostalgia’s reassertion in radical politics is best explained by reference to political change (such as the demise of communism) and chronic political dilemmas. (54)

According to Bonnett, “Contemporary British psychogeography may be viewed as a creative space where feelings of loss and redemption are explored and negotiated,” although the dilemmas “negotiated within this body of work are far from unique,” and there have been other “critical deployments of nostalgia by avant-garde groups” (54).

Bonnett turns to Iain Sinclair’s writing as one example of “a creative space where feelings of loss and redemption are explored and negotiated”: his “double mapping of modernity and loss is narrated as an engagement with alienating, often brutally instrumental, landscapes. These places (or non-places) offer disorientation and disharmony while establishing the necessity of resistance and human solidarity” (55). Bonnett argues that London Orbital is Sinclair’s “most revealing and edgy confrontation with the dilemmas of radical nostalgia” so far (55). His exploration of the M25 expressway (the “Orbital” of the book’s title)

both repudiates and welcomes its disturbance, its capacity to dehumanize and deracinate. The ceaseless motorway provides the kind of hostile terrain and antagonism to sentiment required by Sinclair, both explore the creativity born of disorientation and his own profound sense of loss. The road and its surrounding ‘retail landfill’ are used to experience the violence of modernity. It is a violence that lures those who find themselves in and against their era. (55)

Sometimes the tensions in Sinclair’s work are resolved through apocalyptic fantasies (57): “Visions of the doom of Western civilization combine the violence of modernity with a violence towards modernity. They are a familiar avant-garde trope. However, Sinclair’s work offers other, less cataclysmic resolutions. Indeed, his wanderings may be represented as a search for restorative and redemptive community” (57)—in Edge of the Orison, for example, which traces a journey made by poet John Clare (57). However, unlike Clare, “Sinclair never belongs. Indeed, he implies that belonging is now impossible. But this only intensifies his hunger for company, for a community of the dispossessed” (57). This Bonnett suggests, is the reason Sinclair walks with others (58). “It is in Edge of the Orison that Sinclair comes closest to the kind of heartfelt sense of remembrance that one always suspects lies just below the rather glassy façade of London Orbital,” Bonnett continues (58). 

“Reading Sinclair, one may wonder how his melancholic concerns could ever be compatible with the rhetoric of class struggle. Such an incongruous mix is precisely what can be witnessed within the agitational psychogeographical groups,” Bonnett writes (58). While editing a psychogeographical journal, he saw “the odd amalgam of preservationism and radicalism, modernism and anti-modernism . . . propelling psychogeographical activity” (59-60). The occultism of that era of psychogeography imagines the occult, and “other hidden forms and sources of power,” as “a class strategy, a technique of control in the management of the spectacle,” ideas that came to be called “magico-Marxism” (60):

As with many avant-garde interventions, magico-Marxism is determinedly disorienting: is is evasive, infuriating, constantly asking that we see the city in new, unexpected ways. However, I would also argue that the disorienting game played by these psychogeographical groups acted to conceal and cohere the tension between anti-nostalgia and nostalgia, modernist and anti-modernist politics, that animated their project. (60)

Magico-Marxism “combined communist militancy with a romanticization of landscape and memory” (60). Some psychogeographic groups romanticized decaying or abandoned landscapes while being hostile to the destruction of old buildings (62). Bonnett suggests that the impulse towards preserving old buildings, and a hostility toward the construction of new ones, indicates that “the relationship between radicalism and nostalgia is changing”: “The hostility to the past that shaped the socialist tradition from the late 19th century is no longer the force it was” (63).

In his conclusion, Bonnett writes,

Modernity turns the past into an arena of provocation and danger. Attachments to the past and feelings of loss become sites of repression and potent resources for resistance and critique. These processes can be seen at work across many political projects. However, they appear to have a uniquely troubled relationship with that set of ideas and ideals associated with the pursuit of equality and the critique of commercialization that we can, perhaps, still call radicalism. (63)

The different psychogeographies he has discussed “illustrate different ways the dilemmas of radical nostalgia have been negotiated” (64). In Sinclair’s writing, “the non-place urban realm becomes a site of creative purgatory, a necessary violence that simultaneously positions the writer as dependent upon and antagonistic to deracination and alienation,” while in what he has called “revolutionary psychogeography,” the “tension is organized around themes of communism, occultism and preservationism” (64) The result, however, “has a desperate quality: it wants to be communist but it no longer believes; it wants to articulate the sense of loss that sustains it, but it does not know how” (64). The impulse towards preservation of the built environment appears to many as culturally conservative, reflecting “a political paradigm that, although dominant, no longer inspires the automatic loyalty of creative radicals” (64). “With the collapse of communism and the widespread questioning of the sustainability of industrial modernity, the radical imagination has been profoundly challenged. Old assumptions and prejudices can be overturned. And not the least of these concern the role of the past in the politics of the present,” Bonnett concludes (64). “[T]oday the shame of nostalgia is fading. It is perhaps fitting that it is radicals at the most iconoclastic edges of political and cultural life who are beginning to grapple with the fact that the poetry of the future is no longer enough” (65)

Bonnett’s essay doesn’t resolve the tension between nostalgia and radicalism, but it doesn’t have to: it identifies that tension and shows examples of it within psychogeography, and that’s all Bonnett set out to do. His discussion of magico-Marxism is valuable, although my revulsion at the occultism of much of 1990s psychogeography is such that I’m unlikely to pursue that direction of research. In any case, I’m not sure that the tension between nostalgia and radicalism can be resolved—not at the present time. What is clear to me, though, is that I will need to understand more about nostalgia in order to explore my nostalgia for landscapes and histories I have never experienced. One place to begin, of course, is with Bonnett’s bibliography. Another place is by reading more Iain Sinclair, especially Edge of the Orison. Wouldn’t it be great to take a course on Sinclair? Or, even better, to teach one? Maybe someday. It’s possible, even if it feels unlikely.

Work Cited

Bonnett, Alastair. “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography.” Theory, Culture & Society vol. 26, no. 1, 2009, pp. 45-70.