Unsettling Settled Contingencies: Notes on the Enduring ‘80s

Part of being human is coming to recognize your most fundamental lived assumptions as just that—assumptions. Contingencies that seem like they couldn’t have gone any other way. Good luck shirking that one. The alchemy of time inevitably changes things around you, revealing what had seemed immutable as transitory and what had seemed over as far from it.

This occurred to me while watching the Andy Warhol Diaries. As noted in one episode, Warhol was characteristically insightful in picking up on the vibrancy of ‘80s cultural innovations at a time when their salience often didn’t register for his contemporaries. He was right. The late ‘70s and ‘80s gave us innovations that have shaped the world since, including punk, graffiti, metal, and the like, but perhaps most notably hip hop, which has defined not only the aesthetics of the global cultural landscape but also the conversations around race, police violence, and inequality that define our time. I took all of that for granted when I was growing up. It was the weirdest thing in the world to later realize how young those cultural currents had been when I first experienced them in the ‘90s. If they’d been people, they wouldn’t have been old enough to drink in a bar.

If the ‘80s can be used as shorthand for what those raised in the ‘90s took for granted, then 9/11 can be used as shorthand for the first major cultural rupture that members of that generation experienced first-hand. Bret Easton Ellis is on to something when pointing to a shift from Empire to post-Empire culture in the early ‘00s. The Empire era was that of America after WWII, when the country was on its ascendancy. The Empire perspective was about a polished image and glamor. A public facade. It was Hollywood and formal political speeches. The Post-Empire era has been America after 9/11, when the country has been descending. It’s about undoing that professional/public façade. It’s social media and pajamas in the workplace. Face tattoos.

The Post-Empire flattening of those distinctions brings to mind the passages in Gravity’s Rainbow where Pynchon points out that everyone forgot about the moral and religious basis of the Smithian unseen hand of the market, missing the point and cherry-picking parts of the metaphor. Similarly, Post-Empire culture feels like the ostensibly egalitarian responses of the ‘60s to bubble gum, blue jeans, and the Beatles but without the democratizing veneer. Both trends feel like senseless and disingenuous cases of leveling-down.

Anyway, for those of us on the receiving end of all this in the ‘00s, we could still smell the Empire era in the hallways, but it was clear things were going in another direction. Bunuel’s sendups of middle-class morality felt like dispatches from another world, though we were close enough to the Empire era to have a sense of the bite behind them. Published at the time (2004), sociologist Michael Mann’s Incoherent Empire seemed to put its finger on how American imperialism had lost its composure when faced with its descent. The Post-Empire reality felt as discernible in War in Iraq idiocy as the cultural corollaries described by Ellis.

If 9/11 points to the first rupture, then Covid is good shorthand for the second. Of course, as with 9/11, its elements (social media, Trumpism, etc.) predate the actual event. Indeed, appropriately, that prophet of American culture Iggy Pop rightly put his finger on the atmosphere of the time in the rant that ends his outstanding Post Pop Depressionfrom 2016 (while Dylan might be the genius of looking backward to mine American culture for enduring truths, lowly James Osterberg remains the authority of reading the present and leading the vanguard). This was the start of the conspicuously not-new as the new “new,” or as Pop says in his rant, “There's nothing awesome here [America] … nothing new.”

Indeed, nothing new. From another vantage point, the taken-for-granted impact of the ‘80s on the present has rightly led some commentators to point out that the current time could be thought of as the “Forty-fourth(ish)” year of the Reagan administration. Reagan-era conservativism continues to have an outsized influence on what we take for granted: “family values,” Latin American intervention, nuclear proliferation, etc. On this account, this ‘80s political framework would then have been channeled through the trappings of Post-Empire decline during the 9/11 period to bring us to where we are now. This would be another—quite different—way that the thinking of that time has stuck with us. Could be.

Of course, you could argue that the era of Post-Empire Reaganism isn’t just old wine in new bottles. It’s surely as new as it is old. Or, alternatively, you could go back further and argue that what’s below the surface of this more contemporary American garb stems from uncertainty regarding modernity in response to the horrors of WWI, or follow some postcolonial theorists to point to the collapse of universalizing Enlightenment rationality as the impetus behind all of this. I’m inclined to think there’s at least some truth to all of those perspectives given the accretive quality of history; none of this ever comes from a vacuum.

Still, regardless of where you put the marker of potential antecedents, the point regarding this version of Post-Empire reality is that substantive conceptual innovation has been cut short while the pace of cosmetic change has accelerated, leading to frenetic turnover within stagnant frameworks. This is Pop’s “nothing new” tedium coexisting with the endless succession of “unprecedented times” we’re all so sick of. As something of a metaphor, what comes to mind are the passages in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel rants about mathematics as unable to capture qualitative conceptual transformation as it is limited to measurement of what appears before it. Similarly, we’re experiencing quantitative change at a lunatic pace amidst conceptual dark ages.

Time unsettles settled contingencies. And, in doing so, it has a way of underscoring that what had seemed settled might have been less so than one had hoped.