A play on the word hemophiliac, a Nostalgiac has a similarly delayed clotting function. Rather than biological, this clotting is present in the psyche, taking its psychogenetic root in the subconscious and extending into the preconscious. The condition of the nostalgiac makes it so nostalgia is allowed to propagate unimpeded throughout the psyche and feel as if it can be prescribed “meaning,” as if it were a piece of fiction written to elicit an emotional response. There is an inverse relationship between the calibre of the Nostalgiac’s affect and the rigidity of thought that arises as a consequence, as nostalgia is allowed to flourish more and more in a feedback loop, the Nostalgiac becomes more and more fixated on the “virtues of the past,” creating additional feedback loop to the degree of n+1. These loops compound to produce a well fleshed-out false image of one’s own psyche, a very similar process to obsessive compulsive disorder.
The Nostalgiac operates on a sort of emissive-artifice model, they process, evaluate, and assign a certain calibre or grade (‘ve) to the object of their ideation. This assignment of a secondary tag is the primary element of the Nostalgiac process that gives their projects and works such a repressed quality. The ‘ve axiom itself has an emissive root; its genetic lynchpin is that in the same of the creative endeavour itself. More loops for bleeder! The creative propulsor is immediately suffocated by the tyranny of ‘ve. Through a self enforcement of anagogical laws of imitation, narrativization, and emotional “catalysism,” every project is turned into a gallery or erroneous archive of a basketcase’s fogged recollection of God’s dead country: “I reveal to you, in great erotic embarrassment, what I’ve done to He’s. And what He’ve done to I’s.” Self voyeurism through estranged piety, the Nostalgiac artist invents their own damned clots at the furthest reaches of revelation and sin.
One can be sure that the Suburbiacs have eaten well, but is it skinsuit or ouroboros? Either way, the Nostalgiacs are sheathed from the outside, wrapped in a weatherproof protective faux-linoleum lining (expertly styled to resemble fecal-stained bathroom tile) with coffee-patinaed albums of someone else’s Polaroids stapled to their eyes. Their innards (to the second power, no less) glisten with sweat but they remain “dry as the Sahara Desert!” Lurid impotence and a smart-TV’s factory settings. Jodi Dean argues that the ones “taking the struggle from the streets to the galleries” are aesthetically inspired leftists, when in reality the Suburbiac, a being who absorbs and assimilates political ideology, is the one currently at the reigns of this transport. The Nostalgiacs are a plentiful bunch, one may even say that we all have a scrappy little Nostalgiac powerhouse fascistically barking orders at our internal lines of winged industry. But the Suburbiacs live on a vow, they lend their bodies to an order of high Nostalgiac priests, they are artistically celibate but, inversely, more-than-ready to share with the world their nervous and inhibited gnosis; a militant regime of puritan null-pointers. The once artistically “erogenous” zone (which, for the Suburbiac, is a now decommissioned, nay, unthinkable, avenue of industry) of the Suburbiac project resides at the receiving end of that null-pointer; anything transgressive or burgeoning is spread across the entirety of the infinite null-expanse. This is 0exodus, an ageless and endless escape of creative industry onto a terminally dissolutive and ruthlessly appropriating surface. 0exodus is what truly bakes a nostalgia-based temporality into contemporary art: when encountering zero, refresh.
The Nostalgiac supplies an irreversibly time-coded axiom, while the Suburbiac puts into motion a forever forward-marching 0-ntological process. At first this seems to be a shockingly counter-intuitive relationship: “I give you the grid and all you do is blitz my toys to 0?!” But it is exactly this element of endless self defeat that makes this process so growingly ubiquitous. Nostalgia is an emotion of retroactive malaise (the other-worldly jouissance of nostalgia is always neutralized by a longing or lack), so to produce more of it the present must be continually destroyed, a new set of objects for nostalgia must be generated. The Suburbiacs make this happen at a constantly accelerating pace, as when nostalgia accumulates – as it tends to do in our contemporary spectacle based society – both its affect and effect become weaker, and therefore each set-refresh must come sooner and sooner. More at 0.