Abstract
It's 1983, a new series, Stranger Things, hits TV screens, shoulder pads and Converse are in fashion, the radio plays Joy Division's Atmosphere, even though the band broke up in 1979, America and Russia are at loggerheads in the nuclear conflict, music is played on vinyl or Walkmans, and the cinema prepares for the release of Ghostbusters. It is now 2016, the actual year of the series' release, and the past seems to have crystallised. Stranger Things could indeed have been a cultural product of 1983 without arousing suspicion in the unsuspecting viewer of the time. Similarly, if the fictitious 1983 viewer were unknowingly catapulted into 2016 thanks to an experimental trip into the future, he might believe he was living in the 1980s. Nothing or almost nothing would make him believe that he had travelled forward in time as a guinea pig in a scientific research project, little or nothing has changed. Time is out of sixth! The past has become ghostly, haunting us with the ghosts of imagined futures never realised. The present takes on the hauntological dimension of ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’. The result is an endemic state of nostalgia, prepared by retromarketing in the 1990s and brought to maturity in the new millennium thanks to digital media. The culture industry is tinged with retro tints: vintage, remake, reboot, revival are symptomatic of a profound crisis of temporality. Postmodernism is dead. Everything that had characterised this aesthetic, artistic techniques such as citation, pastiche, collage, mush up, cut up, and styles such as camp or kitsch, have reified becoming a background element of pop culture. In its place emerged retromodernism, an oxymoron, already obsolete before it was even uttered.