statement of purpose

The book is an analysis of popular culture in the eighties. Specifically, I am looking at the disconnect between popular culture and Reaganism.

This started off as just an observation: Why was there 80s nostalgia? I remember the decade, and I don't remember anything tremendously worthy of adulation. More to the point, why did the nostalgia have so little to do with how the decade actually was? I guess this is a common complaint about most times, but as the 80s is a pivotal time in many ways (more about this later), this particular version of nostalgia blindness just ticked me off.

I didn't really want to study nostalgia as a phenomenon, however (too vague, abstract), so I needed a handle. It was fairly easy to prove that the eighties were not really like that. What I decided to study was Reaganism. I was not (and still am not) tremendously drawn to Ronnie, but Reaganism means more. Reaganism refers to the groundswell of support, the political movement that accompanied Reagan. It also refers to the social, cultural, ethical...

I then started to look at the popular culture of the era...largely because that's what I do...and I realized that while most 80s popc did not support Reaganism, the stuff that people remember--that the nostalgia is based on--largely did. So I then wanted to study the stuff that worked against Reaganism. I'm ornery that way.

The culture that most actively worked against Reaganism all followed a particular pattern. It was largely teen boy culture. It was largely discounted as escapist/silly/whatever (still is, especially in the nostalgia industry). It wasn't completely anti-Reagan...it was more subvertly political.

Yes, I could've studied really confrontational stuff like hard core or hip hop, but open rebellion was not what interests me. What I'm interested in is how the various political strands weave together into a tapestry of ideology. The subtleties. Culture as an intricate dance.

Along the way, I realized that what everything was ultimately about is how identity is pushed. That tied into my general distrust of most of the standard academic paradigms, including reductive postmodernism and neomarxism. I was not convinced they were right. I was not convinced that everything could be boiled down to either representation or the race/class/gender axis.

Eventually, I found a new model for thinking about how identity works in culture. I found that model in complexity theory. And, when I thought I was doing pleasure reading, I found it again in later cyberpunk.

Thats what this project is about.