Abstrakt
The article opens with an assumption that post-socialist nostalgia must not be assessed as an isolated cultural process but should be interpreted against the background of the dismissive approach to the socialist past in the early 1990s. The prevailing disidentification with socialism at this time must be our starting point when looking for the meaning of post-socialist nostalgia.
The article seeks to map some classifications onto the existing concepts of post-socialist nostalgia and re-read it from the perspective of memory functions and continuity building. It does so by providing a detailed description of the early 1990s discourse of symbolic nullification and annihilation of socialism in Czechoslovakia and Czech Republic and it shows how a lenient and permissive approach to the socialist past (i.e. post-socialist nostalgia) emerged as a backlash to this practice of discontinuity.
The article explores uses and modalities of the concept of post-socialist nostalgia in the still emerging field of cultural studies focused on the region of Central and Eastern Europe. It encapsulates both the cultural and socio-political forms of post-socialist nostalgia, defined as tinkering with the remnants of the socialist popular culture, television, fashion or design and reminiscing about social welfare under the communist party rule.
The main aim of this theoretical paper is to demonstrate the anti-hegemonic dimension of post-socialist nostalgia, which disturbed the official memory politics that promoted discontinuity with the socialist past in the early post-transformation period of the 1990s. The dynamics in Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic in this period are presented to illuminate how discontinuity in the memory politics was embedded in retroactive justice, legislation, the economy, etc.
In contrast to these elitist discourses reducing the memory of socialism to its crimes, the pop-cultural post-socialist nostalgia (the low-brow discourse less strictly policed for discontinuity) served as the venue through which the continuity with socialism was redeemed. Reunion with one's own past and reclaiming the right to remember the past fully is presented as a source of cultural pleasure, the backbone of both types of post-socialist nostalgia.
In the case of socio-political nostalgia, the pleasure of continuity is experienced as partaking on the "socialist signified" -carriers of socio-political nostalgia indulge in rehearsing memories of the substance of the socialist order, social security, full employment, paternalist state, etc. In the case of cultural nostalgia, the pleasure of continuity is managed by the consumption of the "socialist signifiers" -images, surfaces and signs iconically or indexically referring to socialism.