Nostalgia as Utopia

Alexander R. Galloway writes in Warcraft and Utopia (ctheory.net):

"There is a second model of utopia that is less often identified: nostalgia as utopia. This utopia privileges life before capitalism, minimalism and disengagement from the world system. Thus, in the historical period in which the commodity is no longer primarily an object, but has become an image -- the so-called society of the spectacle that emerged in the middle twentieth-century -- one sees the emergence of minimalism as an aesthetic project."

This strikes a personal note. Reflecting on nostalgia, memory seems to have re-cast the past in a light that is pleasing. We find ourselves trying to re-live certain moments that are only pleasing in recollection.

Expression of Thought

"Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help lbut liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of existence, in its very dawning, is in itself and action -- a perilous act."

--Foucault, from the opening leaf of Language, Counter-Memory, Practice