Longing for the Past: A Semiotic Reading of the Role of Nostalgia in Present-Day Consumption Trends

Coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to designate a pathological longing for distant homeland, the word “nostalgia” was soon rearticulated temporally, to refer to a lost epoch one yearns for as one’s home. Nostalgia is not a new topic for semiotics. Emotion essentially stemming from absence, it epitomizes the semiotic mechanism: semiosis is the ontological result of something staying for something else, but nostalgia is the emotional result of it. Essential figure in Greimas’s structural outlook on passion, umbrella-concept in Baudrillard’s mourning of reality behind the simulacra, key notion in Culler’s and Frow’s dissection of the semiotics of tourism, nostalgia has become a buzz word in both critical and marketing studies, the former trying to unveil beneath it the foundations of ontology or the contradictions of post-modern society; the latter, seeking to exploit nostalgia as what critical theory could deem the last Trojan horse into the agency of the consumer. On the basis of copious and manifold literature on nostalgia, the essay hints at an unexplored direction: can one talk, today, of nostalgic trends of consumption in Europe? Where hipsters, vintage furniture, and retro TV channels are nothing but symptoms of an emerging mentality?