Description
Obsessions with the past are, after all, not limited to traumatic events and their often symptomatic and pathological effects. As critics of the culture industry will argue, any past can be used, commodified, distorted, marketed, reworked, displaced, indicted, prosecuted, judged and—forgotten. But even the discourse of forgetting, as sociology and psychology have shown, still contains traces and residues of the past. Culture and heritage industries create retro-fashions, repro-furniture, restaurations, remakes and repurchase markets—all terms in our vocabulary that have replaced the celebration of the new, the avant-gardist, the revolutionary, the promise of alternative futures. n
