The past is a target of systematic underestimation by PR.

Evidence

This raises the question of nostalgia again: is hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a name for nostalgia? Is it about pining for social democracy and its institutions? Given the ubiquity of the formal nostalgia I described above, the question has to be, nostalgia compared to what? It seems strange to have to argue that comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any culpable way, but such is the power of the dehistoricising pressures of populism and PR that the claim has to be explicitly made. PR and populism propagate the relativistic illusion that intensity and innovation are equally distributed throughout all cultural periods. It is the tendency to falsely overestimate the past that makes nostalgia egregious: but, one of the lessons of Andy Beckett’s history of Britain in the 1970s, When The Lights Went Out is that, in many ways, we falsely underestimate a period like the 70s – Beckett in effect shows that capitalist realism was built on a myth-monstering of the decade. Conversely, we are induced by ubiquitous PR into falsely overestimating the present, and those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 67

Categorization

• APHORISMS: ‘Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever’ is a sharp rejoinder to Santayana worth circling back to.
• SEED: ‘Nostalgia compared to what’ is a reusable debater’s move against charges of retrospective idealising.
• XREF: connects to: Rapid online copying now kills new music scenes before they mature — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 250