Regimes of Temporal Affect: Actualism, Nostalgia, and Retro Cultural Practices in the Hyperdigital Present

Abstract

The hyperconnected societies of the early decades of the 21st century show a paradox. The temporal regime that most rapidly consumes and discards the present is also the one that most intensely produces, demands, and commercializes the past. This theoretical and exploratory study proposes the concept of the regime of temporal affect to make sense of this paradox. The concept brings together three levels that the literature tends to study separately: the structural-historical level of regimes of historicity, the sociological level of acceleration and actualism, and the neurobiological level of temporal affect. The main argument is that retro cultural practices do not constitute a form of critical resistance to the actualist regime. Instead, the deficit of resonance and its commercial management are two sides of the same process; therefore, contemporary nostalgia operates less as a form of contestation than as an affective technology for adapting to an acceleration without a horizon. The validity of this argument relies not on empirical testing, but on the internal coherence and explanatory capacity of the concept when applied to a set of phenomena whose apparent dispersion conceals a shared temporal logic.