[...]torical drama
pseudo documentary
period drama series
--> providing the viewers with a “useable past” that is always related to and relevant to the concerns of the present


in the postsocialist region, the past has especially sensitive nerve endings in the present

national regimes & individual citizens alike have tried to revive usable paradigms of identity from past periods (to clear away or at least cover up the historical debris left behind)

television as a massive archaeological site

polymorphic, undefinable identity with tentacles in several fields that makes television (and popular internet media) so confusing

(to understand who has stakes) in keeping history and memory practices separate and in minimizing the role of television and other popular media


(internet popular media) television's messy status as a medium

communist parties --> mould television to standardize citizens's everyday domestic life rhythms
•cheerleading docufictions
•educational quiz shows
•uplifting entertainment such as theatrical broadcasts of Russian and European classics
•doctored news
•limited advertising
•domestically produced dramatic series focused firmly on the romanticized historical past

{projective ideals =/= actual experiential realities of socialism}==> layer of ironic distance between [media (television) and its viewers]

(1990s following the Soviet empire's disintegration -->) ironic overidentification ==> nostalgia
--Imre--> evasion of television allows for nostalgia to be misframed and misappropriated as a sentiment that marks the end of socialism [temporally and clearly demarcates backward-looking postsocialist populations from forward-looking (Western) observers]
----> takes into account television's (and internet social media) relevance to collective memory

post-X nostalgia: a near-visceral yearning for the false sense of safety derived from the memory of X (fetishistically attached to public personas or consumer products of the past)


nostalgia: an interpretive framework }<-- **sense of intimate sociality disrupted by the collapse of a centralized system of governance and the influx of globalization**

nostalgia is a discourse (that is not specific to Eastern Europe) populations disappointed with and unequipped to deal with the advent of market democracy


there are more than one way of (content of) longing

television: a medium whose chief mode of operation is in reruns, recombinations, circulating formats and generic adaptations that constantly interweave national, regional and global scales ~= digital social media

(Imre > Boyer) to trace nostalgia back to the intellectual origins of European cultural nationalisms

...diverse and contradictory sentiments that make us see European cultures conjoined in mutual relationships of dependence, rather than separation

(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*

nostalgia --foreground--> coexistence of different temporalities in the present

postsocialist nostalgia in Romania is similar in structure to late socialist nostalgia of the 1980s in Hungary

manage feelings of dislocation ==> longing for national homes
~~--> preference for literature and high art as expressions of what has been identified as cultural nationalism (“national tradition = tradition invested in high art”) + perceived illegitimacy of popular cultural production and consumption (concealed by the allegedly rebellious “dissident” status of intellectuals) ==organize==> the contents of collective memory


Imre --> racialized underpinnings of allegedly “pure” aesthetic judgments


inherently nostalgic and pre-modern postsocialist population <==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


television's capacity for personalization and narrativization

*demiworld of popular culture*
television’s dominant position within the domestic environment and its special appeal to an emotionally available female or feminine consumer --> television: the mass medium of the socialist period --pose--> the danger of a passive mindless consumption of formulaic narratives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch


Western European cultural nationalisms

the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters


(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years


aspirational narrative (of nation...)

postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national culture (elite achievement)


(Bourdon >Imre) the most obvious European commonality --> **a focus on high culture**


national specificities of memory systems developed around television


nostalgia machine
•Putin --> TV programming to a literary Soviet heritage
•Hungarian FIDESZ --> children’s channel of socialist children’s programmes
•showcase oeuvre of popular performers from the past
•rerunning vintage highbrow content: old films, television series and documentaries
•popular music's capacity to call up depoliticized affective memories
•commercials (--trigger--> postsocialist nostalgia)
•
}--> depoliticized reminiscences ==> an image of (socialist) sociality as a natural connecting glue among citizens gathered around the warm glow of their favourite singers and cabaret actors

FIDESZ = alarming racism + anti-Semitism + drastic neoliberal economic restructuring --> television = interfaces of official state nationalism + commercial purposes of a nostalgia industry


(ghost of dictators in) humorous commercial context:
•Tito in post-Yugoslav republic commercials (as anti-capitalist and anti-commercialist hero)
•Ceausescu in commercials in Romania (old footage of him walking his dog in car tires ads)
•
}--Imre--> (blending) *top-down history lessons* + the work of *popular memory* ==> punctuate contemporary continuities with the communist regime that are taboo in official narratives but prevalent in popular perceptions of history
(==Georgescu==> counter-memory <-- does it assist coming to terms with the past, processing the paralyzing past and the humiliating present of globalization coupled with reactionary state control)

socialist advertising (--> promoted products and services that had not competition in the absence of a real market) ==now==> a sense of awkwardness (absurdity of an era) --> an oxymoron ==> (the ads’) appeal ==guarantee==> the authenticity of remembering + mutual recognition (among members of the nostalgic community) ----> *longing for a bond specific to an elusive era*


(for late socialism --Imre-->) [*]nostalgia: a popular and essential compensatory gesture to make up for the loss of a contradictory temporality
+
a mode of continuity with an era that was already nostalgic for the unrealized transformative potential (of real socialism)


(Yurchak's) *frozen present* = the time of nostalgia
}<== late socialist culture itself lived in a nostalgic mode, at a certain ironic, knowing distance from what it was supposed to be according to the memories of the heroic 40s-50s and the remnants of socialist propagand[...]