Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used To Be

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be for one thing the general source of this feeling has changed whatever originally caused us to feel nostalgic is now shadowed dwarfed by something new but what's more Nostalgia has grown burdensome it's almost Inseparable from Melancholy today looking fondly on the past is more depressing than it is enjoyable when it was coined the word nostalgia was almost synonymous with homesickness a composite of homecoming and pain that is pain expressed through longing it meant an uncanny even unhomely returned home later it would mean a wistful longing for a simpler time in the past but that was a long time ago now when we speak of nostalgia it's mostly in reference to Lost objects products and places Nostalgia finds his new Voice through fast capitalism I think it's easy to underestimate the significance of this never 4 has Nostalgia been so widespread affected so many it is nothing less than a defining feature of our time it was Marx who in his first volume of capital described the way we assign an excessive amount of value to Commodities with this theory of commodity fetishism a commodity is never just a simple object that we value solely for its practical uses the moment something becomes a commodity it obtains a new social significance it stands for something says something about the individuals who associate with it this extra quality we see in Commodities Fosters what Marx calls a network of social relations between things instead of social relations between people commodity fetishism is the difference between a plain white T-shirt sold at a lesser known store in the exact same shirt sold for $600 by a high-end designer label the difference we see in the two shirts is a fiction something in entirely imaginary there's nothing about the object itself that could justify its being valued beyond what it took to produce it and its utility if we approach the things we buy strictly in regards to their utility we find that most of it is totally unnecessary and yet we still think it's all worth buying the contradiction of Life as a consumer is that you already know this we know that Commodities do not really possess the excessive amount of value we assign to them but we behave as if we don't the fact is we enjoy Commodities precisely because they are useless there's an excess quality that we give Commodities something that shouldn't be there it's this additional level of meaning that defines commodity fetishism this invisible excess isn't limited to branding and social status it also applies to Nostalgia many of the places and products that you feel nostalgic for serve a very limited purpose outside of your Nostalgia places like Toys R Us and American malls were rendered on obsolete by the Practical value we now get out of sites like Amazon these stores just couldn't compete but we still feel nostalgic for them not because they're suddenly useful to us but because of something they represent the items we feel nostalgic for only function in relation to our nostalgia in the Video Game Night in the Woods recent College Dropout May bosi comes home to resume her aimless lifestyle but finds that things are not the same as she left them nobody has forgotten the horrible thing she did to that one kid bashing his face in with a bat during a softball match until it was almost unrecognizable and they tell her as much we haven't forgotten but her friends are different the town itself is different the old mining operation that defined it since the very beginning is no longer functional the Glass Factory lies abandoned the small grocery store and surrounding shops all closed down so that the franchise Supermarket could open up and the Party Barn is crumpling because there isn't enough to celebrate May's band plays inside what's left of that last one music thumping deep within a corpse after the Acres of useless remaining parking lots fill with Morning Mist they sparkle like the ocean as much as synthetic Seas can sparkle and those who see it think to themselves that maybe there's still such a thing as poetry the setting of Night in the Woods plays as much a role in the story as the characters do in addition to these pre-existing changes over the course of the game multiple businesses are replaced with new ones there are conversations about terrible pizzas bankrupt malls and the song played by May's band with the course I just want to die anywhere else it's an understatement to say that May's Midwestern hometown of possum Springs is falling apart May's friends Greg and be while they didn't go to college like she did have grown up in ways she didn't Greg while still immature and Reckless is trying to reform himself so that he can move somewhere else with his boyfriend Angus bee was forced into early adulthood after the death of her mom and her dad's nervous collapse she had dreams of going to college but now she's stuck managing her father's business but may may is pretty much the same and be resents her for it possum Springs is treated like a prison by so many of the people who live there that's why May's return home is a real slap in the face she was given a away out and she's back why she won't say she spends her time giving vague answers to the people who ask and repeatedly telling her parents who are stressed out about what this means for them financially that they'll talk about it later meanwhile be spends every weekend visiting a nearby Town pretending to be a college student every night back home she falls asleep fantasizing about what it's like Nostalgia runs deep in possum Springs but material and Nostalgia especially may still experiences Nostalgia as a longing for home that's that's part of why she's back to begin with of course but that longing is overlaid with the images of past forms and fresh losses there's an area of the game that touched me in a special way when I found it it's one of the more obvious references to ma Nostalgia if you do a bit of platforming downtown you can sneak through an open window into a space where the Town store is what's left of its spring parade tucked in the very back there's a large Parade float May is ecstatic when she sees it she calls it her favorite anything from when she was a kid but now it sits here Miracle rats in its stomach a useless thing infested with new and vulgar life she's right to call this place a tomb for May malard serves as an image for the good times even though it's presently useless and rotting there's still something endearing about it an excess just like the one Marx described though laid in its tomb malard lives on its ghost haunts the place and just like ghosts Nostalgia works hard to keep the past alive there's no point in keeping the float around except as a reminder but it's not just may possum Springs is generally infatuated with images of its past and can you un haunt a haunted house the city council who you can sometimes encounter while wandering about cares more than anything about depicting pum Springs favorably so as to attract the attention of the market whatever that means there are a lot of murals and statues around town of the old miners back from when the town was thriving when one of them is vandalized it throws the council into a fit of rage and despair but these memorials depict a fake past the mining operation was in fact draun as much on exploitation as it was tragedy the depictions of the worker's glorious existence gives off the same feeling as Soviet propaganda posters when may does find the person who vandalize the mural they struggle angrily to voice their disappointment in its failed promise it's a Comm common feeling when people see these murals and statues they feel nothing but Nostalgia for that life that never existed there's something about possum Springs that's more possum Springs than the town itself and the less possum Springs resembles itself the more uncanny it becomes for those that live there it's a weird Autumn the days are getting colder and the nights are getting longer strange things begin to happen when the streets are empty and there's something in the [Music] woods here we are stranded in the desert and nothing to drink but this delicious Coke I've got to admit I'm addicted to drinking this stuff but Coke is not without its important philosophical lessons in this film The perverts guide to ideology the philosopher schav zizik insists that coke is the perfect commodity the ultimate example of how Commodities and desire function together in capitalism we find that we are actively compelled to enjoy we see this in coch Coke enjoy in capitalism if you are not enjoying then the idea is that you are not doing it right you must not be consuming enough the right things in the right way this is owed to the fact that the structure of capitalism is Thoroughly defined by its elusive excesses here taking this into account zizic analyzes Ko's old marketing slogans Coke is the real thing or Coke that's it what is that itat the real thing just like commodity fetishism this it in Coke is not just another useful material property of coke itself the it in Coke is that excess which is the object cause of my desire what the modern French psychoanalyst Jac Lon called OB patita or in English little object of otherness but besides sounding terrible in English laon insisted that the term always remain untranslated so as to retain a special algebraic meaning OB paa is not an actual object it is more like an objective something that directs me towards something else it's the constant feeling you have that something's missing object a is the nothingness within you your lack of fulfillment but it's also the act of masking that void with what it inspires you to chase after the endless attraction you feel towards certain objects or people is caused by your belief that having them will satisfy you OB is excess it hangs around undefined as that additional quality that makes you desire otherwise useless objects it's never just another literal property of the object itself the idea is that OB makes what you desire appear inexplicably special to you even if it's totally shallow and superficial desire is never about merely satisfying your needs I want to point out how similar this excess is to Mark's idea of commodity fetishism because we erroneously view Oba as an integral part of what we desire we pursue it in the hopes that having it will give us back what's missing inside but we can never truly achieve this excess obj this it the real thing Coke is only a semblance of the true object of my desire it holds the place of that which could finally come along and complete me Coke is therefore the real thing in the precise sense that is never truly the real thing the Paradox of coke is that the more you drink the thirstier you get I am never wholly satisfied a desire is never just a simple craving for a thing it is also a desire for desire itself the hope that I might continue to desire indefinitely perhaps we can summarize desire as a not yet please not yet I'm not yet ready to have the thing of my desire and finally be satisfied not yet I wish to continue to desire and here is where the real pleasure of my desire comes from the act of Desiring itself in David Foster Wallace's unusual Masterpiece infinite g a group of wheelchair-bound geopolitical terrorists hunt for a weapon of M mass destruction overthrow the government while us agents tramble to stop them the son of a famous film director gradually goes insane while attending his dead father's Tennis Academy and various Boston residents recover from their substance abuse problems by attending Alcoholic Anonymous meetings each narrative is intertwined with all the others orbiting the existence of the thing that ties them all together a weapon of mass destruction yes but a rather unexpected one a film its title infinite jet one cool evening a man receives an unexpected copy of a film cartridge in the mail he's a devout Sufi Muslim he doesn't drink and he most certainly does not do drugs therefore constrained to relax without chemical Aid Wallace tells us his unwinding options are severely limited but there is one thing he loves every evening after work he'll sit down in his expensive recliner his steaming dinner positioned on a tray just below his chin so he can eat without the need to look away and he compulsively binge film after film on the telepu until he falls asleep that's why it's no surprise that on this particular evening an evening where he finds himself entirely out of film cartridges he's quick to see the opportunity that this unmarked cartridge offers him he sits down in that expensive special recliner and Boots up the film the next day April 2nd at 1:45 a.m. when his wife returns from her permitted Muslim woman's tennis match she finds him very much still awake watching and she sees the state of his eyes and now soiled recliner an uneaten dinner and she cries out shaking him trying to Rouse him he doesn't even notice her but eventually she looks up at his face Frozen in the contortions of ecstasy and naturally follows his gaze to the telepu where the film has now been set to Loop indefinitely it will be the end of her they're the first ones exposed to the film infinite just the first ones to uncover its true nature a film so entertaining you lose interest in everything else they die this way watching it endlessly glued to the screen but they die happily and yet their actual deaths are but a mere formality later as the bodies begin to rot their corpses will still be watching Drive is the psychological Force which l H stands in opposition to desire if desire is a not yet then drive is the cry for more of the same enough is Never Enough it can be seen in those repeated compulsive behaviors which bring about great pleasure but also great disturbance to one's life laon's concept of Drive shares some of the features of Freud's Death Drive which Freud first introduced in his essay beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud proposed that in addition to the psyche's life drive there was also a drive towards self Annihilation he developed this Theory from the way World War I veterans would re-experience or repeat their trauma as a compulsion to repeat something past the point of any conceivable pleasure although Freud adamantly stood by this conceptualization of the death drive for the rest of his life it was widely rejected and honestly not without good reason I've even tried to work with the idea before while researching for my video on the desire to not exist of all things but still without any success sucess enter laon later into his career laon taught that the Death Drive is a part of every drive not as an unconscious death wish but as a compulsion to enter into an endless repetitive State unlike desire Drive isn't oriented towards the impossible fulfillment of a lack it repeating itself is its only goal this is one half of what we see in the infinitely entertaining film of infinite just its viewers simply must repeat it watching it again and again and again is all that matters to them but that's not the only way the film exemplifies the drive nor the only thing drive has in common with the Death Drive the psychical nature of Drive is its own source of enjoyment but when the repetition of our Behavior goes beyond what is pleasurable beyond the Pleasure Principle we simultaneously enter into the realm of surplus enjoyment of pleasure in pain this pain and the pleasure experienced as a result of it is again the byproduct of excess in this case an excess of enjoyment a common example of this aspect of the drive is the moment when after stuffing yourself full of a satisfying meal you continue to eat to the point that it hurts but it feels so good precisely because of how much you actually ate or suppose how it always seems like there's room for dessert the excess to a meal until you eat it and suddenly everything seems so unbearable but yet all the more enjoyable and of course we see this again an infinite Gest the ultimate Pleasures are delivered to us by what destroys us there's a limit to how much of this our body can actually endure the drive ignores this limit the Death Drive inherent to every Drive Demands a different kind of body one that could sustain its endless repetition in this sense the Death Drive is Undead an excess of life Beyond life persist inside things even after their demise only because it's unable to recognize that its host is already dead but another Paradox a body able to withstand the damage of the repeating Loop wouldn't be able to experience the Surplus enjoyment of the drive anyway we can only experience it when we go past our limitations into the realm of pain we cannot actually have our cake and eat it too this internal contradiction is what makes the functioning of the drive possible as something impossible Surplus enjoyment is not simply enjoyment and then something more it is only enjoyment because of the Surplus because it's been pushed to the extreme let's take another drink of Coke in the imagined future of Infinite Jest years are referred to by the name of their corporate sponsor entire 365-day periods of time are purchased as advertising space like Super Bowl commercials most of the events in the novel take place in the year of the depend adult undergarment it's absurd in the scary way that the most real things are already so much of our perception of the passing of time is dominated by Commodities not just on a generational scale but in annual in America when you want to know what month it is you need to only look to the supermarket shelves drive has a funny relationship with time we know that desire is linear guys by a lack towards an object that holds the place of obj laon's son-in-law J conceived of this lack as something quantifiable because it presupposes a space that we can say is empty that space is missing something to fill it drive on the other hand he says circles around a hole like a black hole a pure negativity where the order of space itself breaks down Drive thus adheres to the idea that the shortest distance to an end point is not a straight line but a curve if we draw two dots on a piece of paper imagining one is where we start and the other is where we want to end up at we could draw a straight line between the two or we could curve the piece of paper and stab a hole through it beginning and end here and there thus occupy the same point in time this is one reason why Drive whose only aim is to repeat itself is curved it's not trying to get anywhere it's already there since simply by being here the objective of the drive is to exist in the same moment forever when this moment is the next moment and will be the next moment after that until the end of Eternity it's like time stops the circulation of the drive is how it almost achieves this dream there are however certain products that we think will be around forever and then one day they're gone but The Disappearance of the things we love isn't always a literal disappearance think of the food you had as a kid that no longer tastes the same sometimes this can be explained by some line of scientific reasoning about how your body itself has changed with time but sometimes that isn't it there's a microwaveable pizza for one that I used to eat all the time as a kid it had egg and bacon on it with this creamy cheese that was amazing it was my go-to breakfast for years it was awesome man I love that pizza but then one day years later I took a bite and it tasted different they changed the cheese or something it was probably cheaper to produce that way but it totally ruined it for me now not only do I no longer have any inclination towards it it's the last thing I would want to eat in the morning and I was reminded by this change that my childhood was dying the Commodities I desire have something about them that makes them seem more special than they are and that would be obj I've talked about objet as an excess lack and the cause of Desire but we can also think of it as that which is in something more than the thing itself remember Nostalgia is The Uncanny return home in the case of Night in the Woods literally it's our return to what's familiar only to find that it's been changed in one crucial regard it lacks the abstract thing that perfectly defined it complaint that things are no longer what they used to be this complaint is actually the very way Nostalgia is produced we feel nostalgic when our expression of the pain of our loss is also a source of pleasure of course not all Nostalgia is the Nostalgia for lost Commodities it's a natural part of human psychology I like to think but I believe this massive new landscape of consumer Nostalgia can only be attributed to the Relentless thrust of capitalism the role of capitalism here can be understood by means of a metaphor in which during a sexual act a woman asks for more meaning more of the same thing to which her partner responds by going Harder Faster frustrating her end of the experience why does he do this it isn't because as is usually the case he's confused about what she means it's also because it's more pleasurable for him to do it his way what we see here is a clash between two drives her drive for more of the same experience and his drive for an increasingly elevated one for Surplus we should notice that this particular partner's enjoyment is only possible at her expense when her enjoyment has been prohibited this is translated first in Marx with his notion of surplus value which is what he called The Profit capitalists generate by paying workers less than the value they provide to their labor generating more and more profit is what defines the drive of capitalism as markx put it the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement the circulation of capital therefore has no limits capitalists themselves are amongst the first to tell you that money is never made it is taken what they mean is that money can only be made via its circulation as capital they're telling you a lot more than they mean to but the expansion of profit also happens to rely on the sacrifice of our enjoyment as consumers when I played Minecraft as a kid I never never wanted to stop I'd play all day during the summer and some nights I'd keep playing on my laptop in my room until the sun began to rise when I got into bed I would still be thinking of my builds was what I lived for for a time but one day maybe not one in particular it stopped being fun the game itself had changed my wish for more of the same had been answered with new features a bigger player base all of which was inevitable of course the game was going to keep evolving but if it were up to me I would have kept it the same those days were exhilarating and now they're gone I get more of a kick now thinking about playing Minecraft than I do booting up the game and running around before ultimately realizing that it just isn't the same it never will be but even when I do boot up the version of the game that I used to play the original even then there's something missing even the original has been rendered meaningless by change this is the profound contradiction in the capital list instruction to enjoy enjoyment is a consumer's duty but the true source of our enjoyment has been taken from us and is constantly being taken from us again except this is exactly what makes desire and Nostalgia possible OB PA isn't just an object that we once had and then lost it emerges only as being lost it is the lostness of our enjoyment it never existed except as something always already missing hence why Nostalgia exists only in retrospect when things are no longer the same no longer caught in the repetition of the drive our disappointment with the Relentless thrust of capitalism in so much that it mutilates and disfigures everything we formerly used to recognize is what turns us towards our past pleasures and causes us to feel nostalgic Nostalgia wouldn't exist the way it presently does if when we wished for more of the same capitalism responded with something other than Harder Faster production once again this loss is necessary for capitalism to function because I am compelled to enjoy and find myself unable to I continue to consume this is what more moderate theorists miss what we perceive as the aberration of capitalism are actually the very things that make the system at all possible its impossibility is the condition of its possibility because in its most basic formulation it's nothing but the drive the flaws of capitalism cannot be amended without inevitably meaning the annihilation of the system itself one of the problems with capitalism is climate change which is why I'm proud to tell you that this video is sponsored by Ren okay hear me out I actually think this is super cool Ren is a public benefit corporation that allows you to calculate your carbon footprint and then offset it by funding projects around the world that help produce the carbon in the atmosphere a lot of brands use Promises of ecological preservation to ease your guilt in buying their products getting involved in helping the climate crisis feels like screaming at the characters in a horror film not to go into the the basement we feel very involved but accomplish nothing what I like about Ren and what maybe reach out to them in the first place is how many details they give you on the project you back every month you get a detailed report on everything you accomplish together with pictures and the impact those projects have had you get to choose which projects to back and there are a lot of super cool ones the first people who sign up using the link in the description will have 10 extra trees planted in their name check it out it's going to take a lot more than just these projects to solve the climate crisis Ren isn't the end all Beall solution to its credit it doesn't claim to be but it has plans to do more with your support and in the meantime it offers you a way to make a real difference without asking for more than you can actually give I really believe in their mission it isn't the case that we should make a return to some era of human history where we did not operate under a certain excess where if you were thirsty you drank water and not Coke no we cannot return to that the excess lives with us forever shopping bags are little ghosts of grocery stores haunting everywhere else all of life today takes place within the context of capitalism there's nothing it doesn't affect there is a spectre which now haunts us all the Spectre of communism so all we are left with is our desire but what happens when we repeat the past the answer is Bleak but simple we compulsively prolong the lifespan of the world past what's possible while gaining back none of our past enjoyment we watch the things we love crumble and rot and command them to take another step forward as Undead husks we hate the result but we do it anyway this is Drive understood from the perspective of one who desires an attempt to regain something lost through its repetition but that was never the point of the drive this is why we should think of the death drive as being Undead through desire the drive itself does not yet recognize that it's dead our enjoyment doesn't yet recognize that it's impossible so all we are left with is our desire but what happens when we repeat the past in his book specters of marks the philosopher jacqu Dera introduced his concept of hauntology the word itself is a clever pun it combines the French word to haunt with onology the field of philosophy that examines being itself the resulting word onology sounds very similar to onology that silent h is what makes all the difference it's clever because hology observes how something absent can affect what's present especially as this pertains to the ghosts of old ideas and lost futures specters of marks devotes a portion of its pages to discussing Shakespeare's Hamlet particularly Hamlet's phrase the time out of joint Hamlet probably means his time the state of the world at the time that play is taking place but the more general idea of time being out of joint of Undead pasts and lost Futures can tell us a lot about Nostalgia and The Uncanny Dara makes the remark that in the play it isn't just time that's out of joint Hamlet himself is out of joint he swears against his Misfortune and this Misfortune is unending because it is nothing other than himself he's out of joint because he curses his mission to set things right to resolve the matters of the previous generation the heavy burden of the present affects us all the philosopher Martin Hyer argued that one is thrown into existence the impossibility of understanding what it means to exist indicates the traumatic nature of existence but existence in the world also means existence in the flow of time the feeling of being thrown into one's place in history indicates another existential trauma as Marx put it the tradition of all dead Generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living but time is not only out of joint in the sense of History the actual temporality of time is too while our drive as consumers is for more of the same a compulsion to repeat the same moment forever eventually we're prohibited from doing so but the loss of that Eternal enjoyment also creates our perception of time what was once here is no longer here the past didn't exist before we stepped out of the cycle of the drive because every moment was the same moment our sense of time exists only by being out of joint as a broken circle now stretched forward and back this also extends to Nostalgia which emerges only when something has already been lost time itself is traumatic we only ever experience time as a series of losses the very definition of time the only possible way you can measure it is change we sometimes try to escape our losses by repeating the past but this cannot satisfy us it won't prevent our future losses either in his later discussions of Death Drive laon spoke of it as a space between two deaths this space is the land of the living dead a land inhabited by ghosts without bodies and bodies without Souls it is also where hology is most relevant Dara has shown us that this space can only exist when time is out of joint the space itself is uncanny Supernatural this is what's become of so many of the Great cultural artifacts of the past few decades the idea of the Remake has become notorious in recent years certain franchises don't seem to know how to stay dead it persists in an uncanny empty way and so we grow ever more nostalgic pum Springs suffers from the same problem after the new highway was built the old road that used to lead traffic through town wasn't used anymore pum Springs was forgotten the city council wants things to return to how they think they used to be but the old tricks aren't working anymore the council is living in the past and a fake past at that you can never go back to something that never existed May personal life functions in a similar way she's still trying to resurrect her dead childhood force it to walk at the same time May spends a lot of time trying to convince people that she's an adult and she's old enough to be sure but if she really was an adult it wouldn't feel like she's not the entire game you treat the town like a huge playground which is how M sees it every day is the same for her she wakes up late talks to folks around town hangs out with her friends and then goes to sleep it's her feverish attempt to relive her childhood she does successfully go through the motions but it doesn't have the same result she doesn't quite understand yet that time has moved forward pausing it again is an impossible state of being monstrous existence some of the people who talk about this game look at May the way be does the problems expressed by the other characters in possum Springs are real problems to see May initially be so dismissive of those problems is frankly annoying it's true that may acts incredibly selfish naive and childish most of the time but but really she's just confused she wants to be a good person but doesn't know how but by kicking around possum Springs every day May encounters other people who not only live in a forgotten town but have also themselves been forgotten by The Forgotten town the more you seek out the hidden places other less motivated players would miss the more you're rewarded with New Perspectives and possum Springs itself these other perspectives gradually help May refine her own on Halloween May Witnesses a kidnapping and chases after the kidnapper but when they seemingly phas through a fence she loses them and tells everybody that she saw a ghost she's been having strange dreams about eldrid Gods a band of ghosts and fish and cities and trains made of stars something inexplicable and horrifying out there calls to her splits her head open with searing hot pain she feels an unending anxiety about whatever is happening but she can't help but heed that call as she races after the answer of what happened that night she just knows this ghost and her dreams are connected then she spends A Night in the Woods comes face to face with an impossible world-ending truth May's anxiety defines the second half of the game at first it isn't obvious what may is anxious about exactly you'd be forgiven if you assumed it was about the kidnapping generally a rather traumatizing thing to watch happen but May's anxiety has been auring even in the first half of the game even before the kidnapping she's been having those dreams they give her a forboding sense of Doom a premonition that something bad is destined to happen she more or less shrugs it off at first but the feeling still stands over her like an omen there's something rotten in the state of possum Springs the time is out of joint the kidnapping only sensor anxiety in into overdrive it is until later that we really figure out what May's going through but even then it still is entirely clear see May anxiety simultaneously her fear of being forgotten identity crisis doubts about the existence of God a symptom of her larger mental health issues and yes something that arises in her uncanny encounters with the supernatural Abigail nus bomb writes in her article on the game that night in the woods layers the personal the political and the supernatural or uncanny until ultimately we understand that they're the same thing I totally agree in the scenes that pertain to ma anxiety there are often two or more of these elements present there's a later game sequence that shows what I mean it's one of my favorites in her final dream may finds herself in a desert made of Stardust Dunes roll off a new Infinity at a dark Horizon they combine with the sky and dissipate into a blur she wanders for a bit there's rubble and ruins and Driftwood in the sand the sky trembles and flashes overhead head with the reverberating death of far off galaxies this is all that's left at the end of everything and then there's God they're just laying there apathetic distant Grand but God claims not to be God and tells No Lie seconds ago little creatures are coming to me and they are asking if I am God and I am asking what God is and they are telling me and I am not this God and this God is nowhere moments ago was the beginning and I am here then and here now and there is nowhere for this God to be hiding they speak of a great Beast who wandered the Sands and then tore a hole in the sky and disappeared they warn May that she's drifting out into that Abyss May asks them if nothing matters what about my friends my home what about the trees and fall and the leaves bare existence meaning nothing you are Adams and your atams are not caring caring if you are existing the universe is forgetting you and I am remembering you but not because I am caring the beginning is moments ago the end is moments away there is no time to forget before everything is forgotten then God climbs into the air and collapses the sky ma anxiety is ultimately an existential anxiety Gods mentions of the annihilation of the future and the forgetfulness of the universe reflect this hology is not just about Undead pasts the space between the two deaths can also erupt into Melancholy Freud defines Melancholy through its opposition to mourning he claimed that when you are in mourning you are aware of what's been lost in the case of melancholy it's totally ambiguous but you still feel like you've lost something Melancholy is thus by Freud's approximation the failure to mourn Freud understood Melancholy as a staged loss meaning that you foresee a future loss and respond to it as if it's already happened however if there's something being treated as if it was already lost then how is it possible that at the same time you're oblivious to what that is the reason for this is that what's been treated as lost has never actually been lost according to zizic the melancholic perceives what is lacking as what is lost OB the Lost object that emerges only as already lost the object cause of Desire is a lack recall m classification lack is an actually existing nothing a measurable emptiness Melancholy interprets this lack as if it was instead an object that was once possessed and then lost this way the melancholic is able to act as if they once had the thing they claim is missing this is also the way desire works but there's one more nauseating reversal left the only way to possess something we never had something that has never existed except as something already lost is to treat what we still have as if it's already gone kind of like like when you realize that one day the people you love are going to die and that realization makes you feel sad now as if they were already gone Melancholy isn't a failure to mourn instead it's mourning pushed to the extreme the purpose of melancholy isn't to mourn your losses so that you can accept their absence it's to perpetually mourn the things that still exist Melancholy is mourning for the sake of mourning as long as what your mourning has not yet been lost you can continue to mourn you can derive pleasure from the very Act of mourning ma feelings of melancholy closely aligned with Mark Fischer's idea of a lost future as discussed in his book on hauntology ghosts of my life instead of there being a future loss the future is itself lost of course you never really had a future but by declaring that it's been lost you can act as if you once did Fisher's complaint is that there's some kind of cultural inertia that has resulted in the slow cancellation of the future he says that time or rather the progression of Western culture has stopped a fact that has been masked by The Superficial innovation of capitalism it isn't that the old forms have disappeared but that they haven't the World of Tomorrow is still the world of yesterday it isn't a totally unfamiliar world I can name most everything in it but it is a world devoid of meaning when fiser wrote his book in 2013 he claimed that it feels like we haven't yet entered the 21st century this is some uncanny Twilight Zone ainal space between then and there the time is out of joy Jo what Fisher fails to notice is that it isn't that time has stopped but that it's kept moving forward the drive of capitalism may look like the systems reliving the same moment forever but we're the ones feeling the effects a common Hasty conclusion is that the stagnation of the present is the fault of consumers to paraphrase bethesda's Todd Howard in reference to the Perpetual re-release of Skyrim if you don't like it why do you keep buying it the unspoken promise here being that if consumers stop buying the things they don't like that if we can simply stop falling prey to our Nostalgia that we can stop being stuck in the present and finally march on together into the future simply put vote with your dollar but for one thing this is a fantastic trick it obscures the drive of capitalism so that the only other thing left to condemn is the desire of the consumer but we are only consumers when there is already capitalism our role as consumers doesn't create capitalism just as consumers do not create their own Nostalgia even so ideology always uses nostalgia to reinforce itself Nostalgia appears to present us with a way out of the mundanity of the present but in fact it actually reinforces the political conditions that make the present so miserable it's one of the ways that capitalism is able to convert the critiques against it into fuel Walter Benjamin discusses this phenomenon in his essay the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction he claims that before its mass reproduction art possessed a special historical identity you can make a million copies of the Mona but these copies would be missing the cultural significance of the original not only that but you'd also chip away at what makes the original Mona Lisa so meaningful and that's where we find ourselves now nothing feels real anymore '90s fashion trends may not be the same as the monolisa but the selling point for the reproduction of such Commodities is the sense of cultural fullness we associate with that time that's why we buy into our Nostalgia of course this is always disappointing and it gives rise to uncanny Renditions but rather than discouraging me from my Nostalgia I only feel more nostalgic as a result but her deflation of expectations our lack of fulfillment to contemporary Society is indicative of a much larger issue Nostalgia distracts us from the real source of our social and political suffering Fisher's book shows how the personal is the political is the supernatural my individual Nostalgia is in conversation with my political ideology together they suspend the supernatural Gap that makes them possible inspectors of Marx Dara concerns himself not with Marx the man but a certain Spirit of Marxism this is Marxism devoid of the forms of action that Marx himself advised the remaining fundamental core of marxist ideology it isn't that this reduction is necessary for a successful future implementation of Marxism that the original insufficient forms ought to be replaced with new and better ones but that the future Redemption offered to us by Marxism is blocked by any sort of determinant measures any attempt to bring about a so-called really existing Marxist State ideology is the imperfect way we understand the world and the illus ways we think we can make it better it looks towards the future implementation of its appraised systems the same way Christians see Judgment Day ideology presupposes some future event where all of the humble suffering of the past will finally be worth it the call for justice will finally have been answered all specters are at their core this call for immediate Justice socialism democracy and all the rest is only ever to come the promised messic future will only ever remain a promise because of the nature of ideology according to the pattern of Desire ideology operates under the premise that there's a socialism more socialist than any attempt at socialism sure the Soviet Union claimed to be communist but let's be honest that wasn't really communism this socialism is the real thing but the true Socialism or democracy is not simply one that promises to arrive in the future but when that never actually does there's always something to postpone it ideology operates as a messianism without the actuality of a messiah zizic states that the two come of democracy is not just some frivolous Quirk of democracy but its innermost reality contrary to what most people believe totalitarianism is not what develops when it's formally declared that we have no more democracy as the Soviet Union showed the moment democracy is no longer a promised future but pretends to have been fully actualized in the present it is then no longer democracy but totalitarianism all sorts of Horrors are permissible when you see yourself as the guardian of a supreme good in the cases of both the personal and the political we Source the loss of our future from the future loss of what still exists in other words the two are the same thing our loss of the future is also of the loss we see in the future and what could this better apply to than the hope for life outside of capitalism the melancholic treats the situation as if it were irredeemably hopeless I claim the opposite of Fisher a lost future is still a Nostalgia for the past a past that never truly happen the way we remember it this is projected into the future as a thing that will redeem us from the horrors of the present ironically Fischer's own ideology Within These Pages resembles his desire to return into a past when the future was still available but we can only ever achieve our desired future if we let go of our tendency to hold on to Old ideas this feeling of fate of being set on a path you can't escape until its end is also prevalent in Night in the Woods it's ironically the game Supernatural elements that best illustrate for us the real world nature of nostalgia ideology and the relationship to anxiety there's an area in the Magnificent game disco elisium that I think about a lot it reminds me quite a lot of Night in the Woods disco elisium is a game full of ideas so its apparent core messages don't seem to be explicit statements but the process of thinking itself it's a brilliant Mosaic of ideologies and Theory underneath which we find chilling examples of real world suffering just like its main character you have to discover for yourself where you stand amongst it all the game setting Martin a has a long and complicated history it is war torn as much by the recent fire of artillery shells as by its competing schools of thought after a failed attempt to implement communism it now sags with poverty under the added weight of neoliberal capitalism it largely represents the Eastern European home of the games developers every school of thought and government has failed in this city but I love it nonetheless it belongs to me as much as it belongs to you like posum Springs Martin A's 2 is haunted by parts of the past that won't stay dead the mark of the supernatural has been most blatantly placed on its doomed commercial area when you first enter the bookstore that's a part of this larger building you'll notice the anxiety of its owner she clutches a mysterious Fish Head charm around her neck asks you in a shrill voice please take responsibility for the energy you bring into this space if you mention her shivering daughter out front she asks you how compelled you were to buy a book after speaking to her she'll judge the worth of her daughter on your response if she notices you doing anything other than look at her books this woman will plead with you to return your gaze there the books are all you care about she commands you to enjoy but what on Earth is she so anxious about as far as she's concerned the building is cursed there is a curse and there is an entity she blames for it when you tear open the curtain in the corner and break down the door behind it you'll find that the rest of the building is a mausoleum for the remains of failed startups the situation doesn't look good even you begin to believe there's something wrong with the place there are certain Corners in any city or town where it seems like every business set up there inevitably fails even the language we use reflects something resembling Superstition they were destined to fail the moment they opened up there the more you chase the supernatural the more it feels like it's chasing you and it's close heart stopping ly close and what is the supernatural if not the laconian real laon described his category of the real as anything impossible anything that doesn't really exist but still has a traumatic impact on the entire structure of social reality in fact the only way to discern the real is through the stain it leaves behind the abnormal way it affects everything that orbits around it it might be confusing to call the real pure reality and then say that it doesn't exist but think of it this way when you take away reality what you're left with is not nothing but the thing that made reality possible we find the real waiting for us this is why laon says that the real is that which always returns to its place it's the only thing that exists when you take away reality it's what must necessarily cease to exist once you bring reality back the non-existence of the real makes reality possible when we Define the real this way way it becomes obvious that it's a perfect description of the impossible enjoyment of the drive the one that we feel nostalgic for laon calls anxiety the lack of a lack what he means is that anxiety indicates the real coming into existence which entails the collapse of reality when you find the entity implicated with the curse she turns out not to be the malignant witch that PL told you she would be but a softspoken woman crafting dice in a huge industrial chimney despite the other dozens of the failed businesses that have swept like a cold draft through the building she's survived Niha has spent the last 14 years in this chimney so it's been refurbished to feel a little bit more like home the rare materials she uses to craft her dice protrude from the wall like iridescent geodes of color although she's painted over the walls you can still see the coal stains on the bricks the ocean wind slices through the air overhead rattling the ceiling living here has directly exposed to the Absurd business ventures whose failures left a dark stain on the building there was a boxing club meant to help steer the impoverished children away from drugs and crime that only made things worse the rumor went around that its punching bag was filled with amphetamines then there was the business promising to repair windows at any hour of the day that was really just a front for its eroticized radio broadcast of real murders with real victims and finally an ice cream company that tried to sell its ice cream children from a terrifying red-eyed Taxidermy bear whose design was revealed to its owner during a trip off silicon gel packets he called it megaion his vision beast and yet Niha Still Remains content in the chimney working with a childlike passion her attitude is in complete jposition to plet there is no curse she says only capitalism she calls the failure of the other tenants a part of our precarious world as you yourself later conclude the only way to load the dice is to keep on fighting but here we find ourselves dipping once again into mysticism we rely on fate to explain the existence of capitalism this is just the way things are the Supernatural is the political in his thesis on history Walter Benjamin conceived of history as a written text a series of events that always will have been between the past and the future is the gap of the present A traumatic Inner Space whose significance like trauma can only be entirely determined after has already happened after it's been assigned its place in history at which point it will become what it always already was we can look at a lot of history in hindsight and claim that of course what happened was going to turn out that way of course selling ice cream from the inside of a Taxidermy bear was going to end poorly all the signs were there the web of influence suddenly seem so clear but the science only really became signs after all of it was over while history does seem inevitable like it was faded to happen that way this isn't how we should look at the present that would make you a melancholic and yet so many of us are capitalism has convinced us to believe in its promise of progress so when we look back at history and then look at how things are now we feel like yeah that's progress except what looks like progress feels like the continual loss of something better the progress of capitalism is not real progress but capitalism for capitalism sake the endless circulation of capital feels useless to Rebel the future the alternate path has already been lost as fiser wrote in one of his other books capitalist realism it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism capitalism is inseparable from from reality in the critique of violence Benjamin explains how this is possible through his concept of Mythic violence his term for the way that malignant economic and political power has asserted itself over all human life projecting a form of authority out into the world but then becomes accepted as reality itself it's Mythic in the sense that we might also call it Supernatural there isn't any actual basis for the powers of liberalism and capitalism their right to rule is self-proclaimed and then increasingly naturalized so that their ideologies appear common sensical inescapable a byproduct of Fate itself the only justification for the existence of capitalism is that it already exists Mythic violence is violent because without a genuine basis for its Authority these economic and political Powers must endlessly strike out exploiting and destroying and tireless repetition in order to establish their power and their reality Benjamin's claim is that capitalism is little more than this violence systems are supposed to be tools but capitalism exists only for its own sake despite the provocative nature of the term Mythic violence doesn't mean outright physical violence the German word that Benjamin uses can also be translated as projection or force that makes a lot more sense considering his main point is on how capitalism and the government have used the law in a way that protects themselves instead of Public Welfare this idea that capitalism is inseparable from reality works as an answer to the real the impossibility of capitalism itself why we believe capitalism to be necessary really why we view it as fate is because of our total shock at its own impossible existence The Impossible always seems to finally and not suddenly happen just like the curse of the doomed commercial area the idea of a curse or similarly of the free market doing its job hides how capitalism affects our life in ways we could never expect when the franchised Supermarket opened up in pum Springs that wasn't the free market doing its job almost nobody has any money in martines or pum Springs to begin with in the final analysis no business is truly thriving Niha herself admits that she really only makes enough to get by but the means whereby capitalism asserts itself also dictates our individual Fates a part of laon's con ceptualization of OBA that I haven't yet discussed is that your desire is the others desire what that means is that your desire works in the way that you believe will make you generally desirable so all desire is the chase for the Lost object that never existed a desire for desire itself and the desire to be recognized that's why laon claims that desire is fundamentally a matter of identity simply by being a member of society you always already have something representing you for you it's as fundamental as your own name what defines you as yourself to others but whatever represents you only works if you recognize yourself through it a certain idea from the political philosopher Lou alus tries to explain at what point we recognize ourselves in our place in society his famous example is of a police officer who yells out in your direction when you turn around you implicate yourself as the subject of their attention because you thought they were referring to you and not somebody else included in the recognition of myself and what represents me is the misunderstanding that what represents me is me but like your own name you've never really been given the chance to decide how you'll recognize yourself you just sort of do you're always already a subject you're treated as if you'll recognize yourself in the call before the call ever goes out so you do I'm sorry to differ with you sir but you are the caretaker you've always been the [Music] caretaker I should know sir I've always been here we see this process working in every circle of social life like consumerism for example ads treat us like we're a consumer before we ever recognize ourselves as one so when you go out and consume you only confirm that you are a consumer all along the personalized ads of the internet are especially interesting because they even tell you what you enjoy before you confirm that they're right if the ad does what it's supposed to that is what you enjoy because you answer the call of the ad and go and buy the product in the sphere of culture interpolation leads us to believe that our culture's values are our own while in fact they have always been handed To Us by our culture because individuals can literally only recognize themselves as the subjects of their society's dominant ideology they become complicit in their own domination their subjugation is no longer limited to the law and its Mythic violence it is ingrained into the very fabric of social reality itself as eek has famously declared ideology is strong precisely because it is no longer experienced as ideology we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom our status as subjects exposes the Paradox of free choice as it stands in every Community you are allowed the freedom to choose on the condition that you choose the right thing that being whatever is immediately given to you but you have to do it because you want to it has to be because you are free to choose it except if you ever choose something other than this right choice you lose the ability to choose at all we see this in the cliche of many Coming of Age stories it even happens A Night in the Woods if you really were my daughter you do what we had already decided for you the point is that you aren't ever really presented with a choice you're always already treated as if you've already chosen May has always already been the first barowski to go to college even before she ever went to college in exactly the same way I never really get the opportunity to choose for myself if I want to enter Society or this particular society in this particular way I am always already a member of this Society our desire means that we're also the subject of the desire of the other we're always trying to answer the call for what the other desires before it goes out we want to be the real thing we've taken the external expectations already given to us and internalized them as the way we desire the same way alus described there really isn't a better way to describe the feeling of Fate than it's a set of choices you've already made it feels like the script was already written and you're simply supposed to follow it this is what's really happening during May's fight with her mom about college by always already having been the first barowski to go to college May's always been what the other barowski never were because if you want to be the thing the other desires you need to be the thing the other lacks even though her parents were projecting their own desires onto her she tried to live up to them she wanted to make her parents proud but may doesn't feel like college was where she was supposed to be she's hoping that her mom can love her even though she's different from what she wants later into the game she finally opens up to her friends about what she's been going through not just about her headaches and the ghosts they've been hunting but something that's plagued her for years when she horrifically beat down that kid during a softball match it wasn't because she had anger issues like everyone said it was something else a deep sadness a feeling of emptiness it Formed inside of her one day when she was playing a game on her laptop and then something broke she felt like she knew the characters they felt felt like real people but the illusion was lifted and suddenly all they were was a collection of pixels the things they said were just lines somebody else had written for them the whole Act of playing the game became meaningless reduced to the sad image of her alone in her room engaging with the same lines of coat as everybody else but then that realization flooded out of the screen into real life the tree she grew up seeing outside her window was suddenly just a thing a meaningless formation of matter and the people around her too moving bulks of stuff their lines already written like there was nothing inside of them and she felt a devastating loneliness a loneliness that hasn't gone away everything she saw in the world was made up of only shapes moving in a way that meant nothing to her nothing in the universe mattered anymore nothing was there for her monstrous existence that sadness spilled over into anxiety and then anger and then violence the day of the match when she stepped up to bat she disconnected when she came to there was blood all over the field and she was on top of a kid she hardly knew swinging a metal bat and there were shapes hundreds of glistening red shapes coating the grass her parents sent her to the town's only therapist a country Doctor Who specialized and well everything and of course that didn't help when she went to college it was all she felt ever every day she could hardly even make it out of her room some have suggested that may has depersonalization derealization disorder but I don't have the credentials to confirm that and I certainly haven't done the research I would need to in order to even talk about it however Hyer talks about this exact kind of experience in his essay what is metaphysics where in he sets out to conceptualize absolute nothingness he argues that the only way to grasp nothingness is through anxiety while our immediate impulse to understand nothingness is to subtract all of reality from reality this exercise is futile instead of producing absolute nothingness in concept it only creates a lack a nothingness where there should be something true nothingness evades language even now as I talk about it to you I act like it's actually something which is contrary to being nothing but no shot we get very far this way this is where hydar turns his attention to anxiety A peculiar trait of human existence is that despite our awareness of our own existence of existence in general we find it impossible to understand what existence really is when we examine beings the lens of our everyday experience confront it directly we fail it's only when we suspend the meaning we've already given reality go beyond language and reason and watch as our so-called objective reality Retreats from us that the traumatic truth of existence is revealed beings as a whole whole Retreat from the nothing but it is only through the emergence of the nothing that the true nature of being is revealed to us at all hydor believes that this process is confined within anxiety because anxiety leads us to question why anything exists at all why is there something and not nothing but this isn't a question that you can ask to make yourself feel anxious the Eminence of nothingness causes anxiety which also overlaps with the moment you ask the question it's a visceral confrontation you can feel but you can't understand except more than having described the Paradox of nothingness in metaphysics Hyer has unknowingly foreshadowed what would later become laon's formula for the real zizik describes the real by calling it a fullness and overwhelming presence after our emergence into language and reality as a subject the real is a lack leftover void in circled by reality and isn't this exactly what we see in hydro's Logic the nothingness in hyd equation is really the truth of being itself the point at which the real of existence is most present at no point do we personally encounter our personal annihilation in heyer's essay only the immediate presence of being Annihilation itself isn't important then except as a crack in the texture of reality a leftover fragment of the real that doesn't by any means cheapen the uneasiness of this anxiety if anything it only goes to confirm that Ma anx is her response to the real it isn't ever outright stated but may doesn't really know who she is a lot of the game include sequences where she's suddenly forced to explore her sense of self while all of her friends have plans to move on from the childhood May is initially stuck on how things used to be but after she starts on the path that gives life to her anxiety there's a space opened up for her to question what she believes what she wants from her life and ultimately who she is when when she mentions at several points in her story the feeling that the people around her have their lines already written that sells it if other people have their lines already written if their subject hood has been exposed surely she must be wondering about herself too how do you define her if you take away her lines the way she's always already been understood if she isn't the first barowski to go to college who is she the thress of your existence revealed to you by your anxiety is also the throne of your position as a subject in both cases you are treated as if you've already chosen you are always already thrown into existence the same way you are always already a member of society when may finally spends her anticipated Night in the Woods it's a necessity she and her friends climb over the fence at the edge of town they Journey Into the Woods past the Crusty mining equipment laid out on the grass and continue deep into the Hills none of her friends believe her when she says there's something out there but even if they did there's no way they could have imagined what they'd find this first encounter with the Colts couldn't go worse May makes a noise they chase after her somebody shoots and she trips and falls hard she spends the next however long in a coma while her friends hide out GRE and angus's apartment a cult member sometimes watches them from the street below but may soon wakes up wanders all by herself to where her friends are nervously gathered and then when night falls tries to limp back out to the mine alone of course her friends run out to stop her from going alone and they Trek after her ghost just one guy the deeper they go into the mind the more may begins to Panic it's here it's here she says but she can't say what she can't stop herself from going towards it either cultists are waiting for them around the corner on the other side of a pit but they don't plan on killing May and her friends the hole it turns out is the answer to everything that's been happening it's the reason everything's felt like it's falling apart May's not the only one who's felt this way the cult formed a long time ago in response to that very feeling when the first two men found it one of them walked right into it and never hit the bottom the other man called his name but he didn't answer something else did except it didn't speak it sang and they gave him answers you see pum Springs was dying if he wanted to save it he would need to SA sacrific people to this pit this hole at the center of everything the eldrich god of the depths they've sacrificed 39 people since then but only people they claim won't be missed drunks Drifters and delinquents the immigrants and lazy people who soak up their tax dollars while they work themselves to death the pit is hungry so so hungry it's been singing to May too she's one of the rare ones who can hear it in dreams and in waking times it's the reason for her fear of the future and it's heavily implied that it's the reason for her existential episodes where everything collapses into shapes but the cultists have got to keep sacrificing the whole presents them with a false freedom of choice either they sacrifice other people because they choose to or everything falls apart and posum springs rots away into ruins and Dusty Fields there have been moments where they've gone without feeding it then some of the worst disasters the town has ever seen happened devastating floods and blizzards this hole at the center of everything is very blatantly the real the very way it's described calls back to how zizic describes it within the confines of reality the real is a lack a void or a gap instead of existing as a horrifying and repulsive presence within reality it is only felt as an absence the presence of what lies at the bottom of this bottomless pit is still felt after it's been fed its latest victim the thought that eventually they'll need to find another sacrifice weighs on the minds of the cultists constantly but the god inside the hole only sings when it's hungry its presence is only felt as a presence when the cultists fail to stick to their routine and this presence is catastrophic to reality it means the end of everything possum Springs will only survive if the hole remains just a whole a void that needs to be filled but never entirely will be a lack of the God's presence instead of the alternative anxiety inducing lack of a lack the cultists are pure ideology what I think is really profound about the real is that reality isn't constructed in response to it like a chess move you make in response to an opponents social reality is essentially nothing but the antagonism it's it's not a response but the constant Act of responding to the same impossibility the real as a lack represents a kind of Deadlock a total standstill between us and the impossible in our attempt to overtake it we never make any Headway the real sticks out of reality but is also already inside of reality as its limit the point is that reality is incomplete it can never successfully incorporate its origin Point into itself and this failure the pit that can never be filled totally defines it the ideology of the cult itself shouldn't be approached as what it presents itself to be but what it represents curiously their worries and concerns aren't limited to the whole itself they're unashamedly vocal about how Outsiders disgust them the cult sees the people that don't quite meet the status quo as Omens of the town's destruction which makes them the perfect sacrifices Drifters and meth heads aren't a part of possum Springs or at least the Cults ideolog iCal perspective of it if they exist outside of the community then they won't be missed by it and their absence will allow for the community to continue to exist except every part of that last sentence is wrong this is to a te a perfect example of what zit calls the ideological fantasy remember how our lack causes us to desire objects that we think will be the thing to complete us if there's something missing inside of us then it must be out there and so we go looking for it the lack Insight of ideology works the same way instead of looking at how the system is insufficient or empty from within we take the position of lack and assign it onto certain subjects that we then can claim are the ones ruining everything the flaws of the system are then understood as coming from outside the system as some disastrous external Force every lack is a lack of enjoyment total satisfaction or fulfillment so when weay paint others out this way we behave as if they have the impossible enjoyment that we're missing the things that Mark these subjects as Outsiders a different accent bodily features culture or a lifestyle give them away to us as secretly possessing an obscene enjoyment at our expense they have your enjoyment and as long as they do they'll continue to hinder you in your quest for the real thing the real America the real socialism the real awesome Springs whatever we use them to absolve our conceptualization of reality of its insufficiency zizic doesn't stop at the fact that the other a radically foreign being doesn't actually have the enjoyment we assign to them no his ultimate position on ideology is much more extreme than that the identity of our position as subjects is nothing but our negative relationship to what we view as the main antagonist of stable social reality without the Outsiders the cult figuratively and literally used to fill the ho at the center of everything the ones they claim are corroding away at the social fabric there wouldn't just be something missing from within the social fabric the social fabric itself couldn't exist the cultist never actually save possum Springs they never really restored to the way it used to be the past form that lives on through their Nostalgia they're only always in the process of saving it but the cultists aren't the reason pum Springs is dying either they're doing a terrible thing but they shouldn't be accused for more than they're responsible rather than blaming older generations for the problems of the present we should direct our attention towards the factor that made their ideology possible we need to look at the whole itself I find it really interesting that disco elisium a game also about Nostalgia also about ideology also has a hole at the center of everything the pale is one of the most interesting parts of the world building for disco elisium but you can very easily miss it in a playr the pale at its most fundamental level is an encroaching entropy that swallows matter and leaves a traversable sea of nothingness behind the border between the world and the pale is an uproar of matter the sight of which is compared to a great vision but the pale itself is featureless there's no color no odor nothing to look at people in the gamees universe seem to have accepted the vacuum of the pale as a natural geographical feature of their Planet like we treat the ocean shipments and travelers are sent through it constantly radio towers set up on every side project signals into it endowing it with actual dimensions that assist with navigation you have to be extremely precise when Crossing into it if you throw a ship in the wrong way it never comes out but what makes a pale so unique compared to similar versions of this concept in other forms of media is that its entropic effects extend to all psychological linguistic and historical phenomena those who travel through the pale for too long not only start to lose their own memories they also gain the memories of other people memories from anywhere in history All Points of data even the thoughts in your head are prone to Violent Distortion the further you push into the pale the steeper the degree of reality suspension eventually even numbers stop working nobody's ever made it further than that it's it may be impossible but a terrifying truth is that the pale is expanding the pale outweighs reality 2 to one there is more pale than there is matter and that ratio is slipping but even scarier is finding out that it's already arrived in martines here within the rafters of this church on the coast there's a 2mm hole in reality you find it there in one of the best quests in the game in my opinion in which you help a group of teenagers transform said Church into a raving Nightclub at first it's only an anomaly of sound a space where all other sounds are silence their vibrations are unable to reach you here in the chilly air the only noise is an Ematic hum but once this space has been measured its data transformed into a sound wave and played aloud on the raver speakers there is only silence and then a low hum creeps up your spine dust is violently kicked up from the floorboards as the air begins to vibrate there's nothing benevolent about the sound it twists your stomach into a knot the rafters Shake plaster work from the ceiling collapses in the illuminated color window behind you cracks tiny shards hailing from the vaulted sky like snow it will devour everything the others begin to panic the speakers are shut off the compressor too nothing works to kill it the sound only stops after every plug is pulled I will tell you a second thing there is a hole at the center of everything and it is always growing I am seeing it and you are not escaping and now there is only the whole eventually the choice comes where you can claim that this puncture in the world is responsible for all of the failed businesses of the doomed commercial area and for the failure of all ideology in mares as a kind of entropic historical Force the Perpetual loss of the future this 2mm hole in Martin A's is the exact same as the hole imp possum Springs there is a lack inherent to every ideology every desire even every subject as a point of central impossibility it's the emptiness within everything lack fundamentally indicates that there's something missing but what's missing never existed so it's all futile internally Hollow the whole in Night in the Woods represent s the feelings of isolation and lack of fulfillment that both may and the cultists feel in possum Springs and the god of the whole is capitalism to return to Benjamin's thesis of History he argues that hell is now it isn't waiting for us around the corner if the system collapses it isn't some kind of outside threat hell is the continuation of things as they are so long as the present is in progress the state of emergency is by no means extraordinary it is horrifyingly ordinary we live in a state of catastrophe always capitalism requires worker exploitation class conflict and unsustainable growth practices to continue to exist the pale is a tangible summary of these issues the horror of annihilation that permeates throughout these games has very little to do with any Supernatural forces the impossible Factor making everything else possible is capitalism it's created the traumas that it relies on to continue to exist the pale itself is also man-made at the very end of disum you have the opportunity to telepathically converse with an unknown being and it Whispers to you these words the moral of our encounter is I am a relatively needed life form while you are extreme all engulfing Madness a volun tyia nervous system ominously near to the planet the pale too King with you no one remembers it before you there is an almost unanimous agreement between the birds and the plants that you are going to destroy us all you're a vient and irrepressible Miracle the vacuum of Cosmos and the star is burning in it are afraid of you give enough time you will WEP us all out and replace us with nothing just by accident there are many obvious readings of the pale as an analogy for climate change but it also functions similarly to the nightmare of History the Spectre of ideology it's implied that it's literally made of all of Humanity's past thoughts and feelings the waste of human thought that the universe is unable to break down the pale is the space between the two deaths realm of Undead past a year ago a designer who had done a lot of work on the World building of this sisum released a document that outlined some of the palale lore that was only ever alluded to in game it refers to individuals known as magpies who steal ideas from the future an act that greatly contributes to the expansion of the pale the past steals the future away from the present destroying more and more of reality one of the figures who might fit this description in game is Dolores day often lauded as the greatest human being to ever have lived Dolores day was an innocent a sacred ruling figure that assumed power over all the known worlds when in office innocences are considered literal personifications of History the decisions made by one are not decisions they are inevitabilities what would have happened anyway only accelerated packed into decades instead of centuries it was said that there was no need to establish their rule with Force because there would be no point and innocence could not help but whenn Dolores day in particular was a Beyond genius philosopher dictator and Military tactician she was the world's greatest and most powerful mystery to her contemporaries she appeared out of time a messenger from the future of the species later she was killed by one of the men in her Secret Service a young man who had come to suspect that Dolores day was not entirely human but something else something that has walked in our midst watching a stumble for hundreds if not thousands of years until it decided to interfere interfere in the course of our history we were supposed to have come up with this ourselves it was reported to have screamed at her before shooting her 22 times in the [Music] chest whichever interpretation of the pale were to believe and maybe we ought to consider that both are correct they hint at the same remedy the only way to counteract the pale is to engage in the act of creating creating something new that's the beauty of what happens at the end of the events taking place inside the church you take that horrible sound signaling the end of time that raging trumpet noise of an angel from hell and use it as the Baseline in a track blasting from the speakers and then you dance not in spite of the knowledge that one day all of this will be gone but because of it the authenticity of that act actually stops the void from expanding at various points in his career laon prioritized different ethics that for him represented the successful conclusion of psychoanalysis the first is the purification of all enjoyment from your desire you have to Traverse the fantasy experience the void behind your desire but later between 1959 and the early 60s Lacon devised a new ethical ideal seemingly opposed to the first instead of pure desire where the only thing you can be guilty of is to be betray your desire the only authentic thing you can do is to identify with your symptom we must betray our desire so that we do not betray our symptom betray our Drive in other words the only true solution to our neurotic symptom is embracing the Death Drive is that which persists inside you even when prohibited Drive precisely as accepting your symptom circulating around it therapy for laon zic says reaches its end when the patient is able to recognize in the real of their symptom the only support of their being in response to L taught that interpolation always fails We are Never Fully what we answer as this played a part in the development of what he called the split subject human beings are always separated from fully understanding who they really are in and of themselves which leads to a compromised self-image conforming ourselves to what is acceptable for the position we occupy in society always creates a leftover part of ourselves that we're instructed to disregard there's always a set of behaviors that are inappropriate for certain situations there are certain things you're not supposed to do in the workplace for example these prohibited behaviors constitute the symptom the strange tabos that indicate the source of your enjoyment the individual is split and it is this very split that connects him with Society while alus might argue that you are a social being in the sense that you identify with certain values or recognize yourself a certain position in society laon claims something else for him you are a social being precisely because you are always trying to be the thing you're told you are obviously ideology is still a factor I'm still being called by what I'm taught I should answer as the difference here is that for Lon the entire basis of your identity is the impass of your antagonism towards what is not a part of the position assigned to you sound familiar it should zizic says the same thing about IDE ology itself not only is a subject split you are only a subject because you are split you can only be what you are if you don't entirely understand what it is to be you precisely when you try to be yourself is when you recognize yourself the least identifying with your symptom means being authentic to yourself because as we all know if you want to be yourself you have to be authentic to what feels right in the moment you can't afford to constantly worry about the other this is why laon says that at the end of therapy the patient should become their own therapist they should be the ones discovering for themselves what they desire when the other isn't a factor you must be the person you decide to be and that's where we leave May at the end of Night in the Woods after the cultist let them leave they defeatedly ride the elevator up despite their conflicted feelings there's nothing they can do but when they step off May's ghost grabs her leg out of nowhere she kicks and kicks and kicks and kicks but she only gets away after the elevator lever is pulled goes crashing down the Earth shakes collapsing the entrance and then there's only Darkness seconds pass while she gasps for air and then she bursts out into hysterical laughter and then the tears begin to flow but after a moment she picks herself back up again and the group finds another way out out she slowly limps through the ankle deep pool of water one soggy step in front of the other The Damp air coming from the surface clings to her face and then she faints the cosmic being of the pit hasn't yet decided to let her go she finds herself floating in an indeterminant space before the jaws of a swirling mass of Darkness as it swallows the Stars except may now has her mind made up when it sings to her she confidently talks back she confesses that she's terrified she's so scared all the time and the fear hurts that feeling like everything is over like it was over long before she got here like it's gone before it's gone but she gets it now even if she repeats the past like the cultist did it won't stop one day all of this will be over but she wants it to hurt when her friends leave when she has to let go and when pum Springs is wiped off the map she wants it to hurt because that means it meant something this pleasure in pain that may commits to is the enjoyment of the drive which recasts this powerful confrontation as the moment may identifies with her symptom her Nostalgia is no longer what it used to be exploring possum Springs to discover new character interactions is in my opinion the most enjoyable part of the game although May is very clearly not a responsible adult at the end of the game we see her transform this social malfunction into her greatest strength she creates her own definition of what it means to be an adult for her being an adult is about connection Night in the Woods is commonly criticized for its ending the cult and the supernatural hole that it worships are said to stick out in a jarring way from the rest of the game but and here comes the here's why bad thing is good actually of this video I think that's the point May's journey into the Mind exposes her to the limit of her ideology the holess of nostalgia the real sticks out of reality but is also already inside of reality as its limit at the start of Night in the Woods May and the cult are fundamentally the same and yet fundamentally different they're both different positions taken with respect towards the same deadlock embodied in social conflict she says the same thing at the game's conclusion I understand them in a way it's like fireflies around the light and then the light goes out what makes her different now is what she says next when I fell off of the cliff I had a vision of possum Springs where everything was gone and it felt awful at the moment but now I realized that I could just build another house move somewhere else may has decided to hold on to what she has while it's still here till it throws her off then she'll find something else create something new May is n defying entropy like some have suggested she's shifting her perspective to account for it at the end of everything hold on to anything the goal of psychoanalysis for laon synonymous with Zik's journey through ideology is not to transcend the symptom or to go beyond it but to restructure our approach towards it in a way that addresses the deadlock it's built around by traversing our fantasy we allow ourselves to enjoy the bits and pieces of our enjoyment that are still available to us through our symptom cic Endeavors to make a aware that we live within an ideology while also showing us that we cannot escape the ideological space we can never overcome the split that makes us a subject but identifying with our symptom means that we can be authentic in choosing who to be and that authenticity enables us to craft a better ideological framework for our societies we can decide our own Fate by accepting where it's presently taking us we can't go beyond ideology but we can go beyond capitalist ideology by accounting for its limits we can because we must we will only achieve a brighter future if we let go of our tendency to hold on to Old ideas and create something new the Eternal present of our day isn't just a lost future but the potential for a new authentic future may doesn't know who she'll become in this new stage of her life but it doesn't matter for now she just wants to have band practice the end of our world may be right around the corner time may be out of joint but that's the exact reason we to surprise ourselves and [Music] dance

Channel: Clark Elieson

Views: 469,100

Keywords: Nostalgia, Night in the Woods, Disco Elysium, Nostalgia Isnt What it Used to Be, Disco Elysium Video Essay, Night in the woods video essay, Slavoj Zizek, Clark Elieson, Consumer Nostalgia, Lacan desire, Objet petit a, Lacan on desire

Id: hbWJYuIkN_Y

Length: 98min 17sec (5897 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 12 2023