Thought Emporium

When I started this project [as a whole, not the Neuromancer chapter], My thinking went through several iterations. First off, I was just interested in a lot of stuff from when I was growing up…even back then, I had the idea that it would be nicer to focus on something I cared about rather than stuff I hated (an idea which occasional research topics show I never really quite remember).

I grew up in the eighties, and I always knew there was something going on there. So I started to look for stuff written about popular culture in the eighties and was surprised at how little I found. This was the first clue that this might be a fruitful area of study.

My first research project on the eighties was on the miniseries V (and its sequel). Right away, I ran into some interesting issues that showed me I needed to think about my choice of topic a little more carefully. V was a fairly interesting piece of science fiction. Plot-wise, it was about contact with an alien species. The species seemingly looked like us, talked like us, and “came in peace.” However, it was all a lie. The aliens weren’t really like us…they were lizards in disguise. And although they could communicate, there was very little of their words that were not lies. They were not here to help us out. Instead, they were here to steal our water (which they used for hydrogen fuel cells) and kidnap humans (which they used for food). The series focused on a group of underground resisters who battled the aliens…the official government in the miniseries were little more than dupes for the alien cause.

Now, when I thought of this, a few things came to mind. This was not all that far off the Republican/Reaganism party line as it first seemed. Reagan too portrayed himself as working against the government, famously declaring “government is not the solution to our problems; it is the problem. As such, Reagan set itself up as the freedom fighter, fighting the tyrannical overlords of entrenched government.

Such an argument was pretty illogical, though, once Reaganism actually took power. After all, how could one be in charge and not also be the power? Could you explicitly be the leader and still resist authority? It never really made sense to me. Of course, there are plenty of postmodern readings and arguments on the relationship of Reaganism to authority, but they, for reasons I’ll get into later, never really struck me as adequate.

There was a deeper problem I encountered with the V miniseries, however. I knew this miniseries was in fact very popular [how much? stats]. In spite of that, this never really felt like a work of mainstream culture. After all, it was entirely about an underground cell of resistance fighters…so the subject matter explicitly dealt with a minority. Furthermore, it was a work of science fiction, itself a minority literature (at that point, though, very few would call it literature–it was more a genre of adolescent boys, geeks, and other non-mainstream groups). The leader of the resistance was a female (at least in the first series). The resistance was a multicultural affair. How could this then be a mainstream work of culture, in spite of the level of popularity?

What made all this doubly weird was how far off the radar of 80s scholarship (what little I could find) and nostalgia (just then starting to hit in force) this was [time for a discussion of each?]. What I got when I read about the eighties in either of these was big hair, pop music, yuppies, frivolous, light, fluffy culture. In fact, most of the stuff I read about the eighties depicted the cultural artifacts as either mainstream (see the yuppies) or escapist/inconsequential (see the big hair).

The very status of this as a cultural product also gave me fits. Was this by default a mainstream product because it was on a major tv network (which held a certain amount of power, back then in the days before cable completely obliterated the “broadcast” model)? Could you have a resistant cultural product released on a mass market cultural network? If it was widespread, did that make it mainstream?

V just didn’t fit into this worldview.

Furthermore, my understanding of V also didn’t fit into the culture studies theories I was learning. When I took classes, when I did my readings, when I read my fellow students’ essays, when I went to my first conference, I saw mostly work which analyzed culture as existing as a mainstream/oppressed dichotomy. Mostly, the scholarship focused on the oppressed, particularly dwelling in the “race/class/gender” triumverate of culture studies topics.

V didn’t fit in here either. It did focus on a minority group, true, but that minority group was diverse, pluralistic, from all over the map. The freedom fighters were oppressed, but there was also the little matter of the governmental dupes to deal with….they certainly did not fit the stereotype of majority. Hell, there were even resisters amongst the alien overlords, including the janitor [what's his name?].

Dichotomies, binaries, and all that just didn’t fit in.

I was having a real problem defining what was going on (which, incidentally, showed in the paper). Standard definitions were not really working for me.

The real issue, in many of these areas, was the assumption of centrality (although I didn’t know the term or wasn’t even familiar with the concept at the time). When you look at mainstream culture, society, media, government, all that, structures were obviously at work…but, the more I thought of it, the relationship between those cultures was not as obvious as most people thought. Too much stuff going on was based around the idea that if there were these large structures, there was obviously something going on that gave order. There was obviously a central command structure. And everything in this structure had a certain tie back to that central command.

The model of Reaganism, at first glance, held up the idea of centrality. After all, Reagan swept into the highest office in the land riding a tremendous wave of popularity…so he was obviously both mainstream and authority. So much of culture worked for the same goals and by the same theories as did Reaganism, so these were also based on centrality. The very real existance of authority, of structures, made the arguments of postmodernism (with which I wanted to have sympathy–expand this) less convincing in explaining all this.

The problem was, V had too confused of a relationship to authority, and that largely blew the whole centrality bit for me. And the more I digged, the less clear centrality got.

[later--I gotta tie this into the concept of interstitiality (see below post)...V becoming, in my reading, an interstitial text, existing between the clear boundaries of ideology, of culture, of philosophy, of all that. And one possible way to build this as a book is, along with the breakdown of the standard definitions (particularly of mainstream) is to move to the supposition that all texts are interstitial in this way. Man, who is the great philosopher of the interstitial?]

More later.