I Love the 80s

What struck me most in chapter five of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities were the ways in which print and media propelled the shift toward comparative history, in which cultural conditions are examined in concert with the traditional names-and-dates brand of history. By its very nature, this was a self-concious project, always in some way or another occupied with the present, as it looked to times past. This was not an altogether new idea, Bede's teleological Ecclesiastic History of the English People certainly had in mind the political and religious issues salient in 8th century Northumbria. However, Early Modern comparative history, unlike that of Bede, was guided by the "sense that the events of classical history and legend and also those of the Bible were not separated from the present simply by an extent of time but also by completely different conditions of life" (Auerbach, qtd. in Anderson, 68). Anderson suggests this shift takes place within Walter Benjamin's concept of "homogenous, empty time," which is calendrical, linear. This disconnect between the cultural conditions past and the present, Anderson shows, contributed to the idea of the "modern," while simultaneously holding "antiquity" at arms length as an object of study, aestheticization, reverence and criticism.

Eventually, histories became an economically viable project, so that David Hume's History of England, published between 1754 and 1761, made him, in his own words, "not merely independent, but opulent." Historians, lexicographers, and a bevy of other academics produced research; printers published it; consumers bought it; and the machinery of print-capitlism hummed along accordingly. This new influx of information was instrumental in the formation of individual nationalist identities, but also opened up for investigation a range of identities in historical context. Thus, the student Adamantios Koraes can look with disapproval upon the state of Greece in the early 19th century, compare it to the prosperity and culture of the ancient Greeks, then have faith in a cultural recovery based on a shared (though completely imaginary) national identity.

So, where does this lead? I would argue that print capitalism played a large role in creating the market for historical cultural material, a market which did not exist before it was made possible by both the printing press and the shift toward "homogenous, empty time." Furthermore, print capitalism dramatically accelerated the process of distancing modern subjects from their historical objects of study by constantly demanding new material for marketing and sale to the consumer. To me, the best example of the display of an aestheticized and distanced object of past culture produced by the media for public consumption is VH-1's pop-culture nostalgia show I Love the 80s, which debuted a mere 12 years after the decade in question ended. For those unfamiliar, the program features a number of talking heads (anywhere from B-list celebrities to current comedians and culture critics) providing commentary on popular trends of the 1980s. More than anything, I Love the 80s is a testament to the pace at which humanity creates, discards and aestheticizes its culture, a pace which has been increasing ever since the media and comparative cultural history first made the process possible. Prior to the latter half of the twentieth century, there simply would not be enough material to fill all those airtime hours.

Anderson shows that standardization in the print media dramatically slowed the evolutionary change of language, so that I would have an easier time talking to Shakespeare than he would talking to Chaucer. But I would argue that print media, in congress with the myriad modern manifestations of media, has dramatically hastened the life-and-death process of cultural phenomena to the point that I have a hard time explaining Buffy the Vampire Slayer to my parents.

In 2004, VH-1 introduced I Love the 90s, which places me far closer to the ash heap of history than I am comfortable with. This leads me to wonder if the distance between the production of culture and its subsequent aestheticization and disposal is growing smaller. Is their relationship asymptotic? Is it possible that someday the latter might outstrip the former and we will find ourselves judging culture against a vague set of values which are not even established yet? I invite you to blog it out with me.