Response

Don't feel inadquate, you weren't then, you aren't now.

What if, instead of thinking about it in authentic/inauthentic terms, you thought of it in terms of how '80s content gets recycled to structure the very response you are having. Or, think of it in this way, two years ago, in an effort to commemorate 9/11 and to garner support for the war, a local newspaper published images from WWII in order to critique (polarize) the community for its lack of national pride. Surely, this move pissed off some people, namely veterans who view such image relics as sacred and belonging to a particular time period. How could they, one could presumably ask, use images that tried to stop something as Evil as Hitler in this type of self-indulgent war about oil and national security. But, you see, in making that move they negate the possibility that that replication is either 1) melancholic or 2) rhetorically functioning to produce that response in order to generate ancillary effects. As it turns out, I am more inclined (able) to read it the second way because I am a rhetorician, because in the second case, you can read the effects such moves have as restoring order. So, you adopt the subject position of someone from a past generation who argues that these teens just don't get it (whatever it is) and are thereby commodifying politically what was meaningful in context. Teens, in turn, can say "it's just a t-shirt" and identify themselves as different than you. In both cases, you are prevented from developing a community on the axis of authentic/inauthentic and thereby unable to harness political action. Except, and here is where Derrida comes in I think, by creating that point of contingency, you don't necessarily have to draw that conclusion. By re-articulating the point of contact, you could create disorder and thus exert some agency.

But you are right, Linda, the 80's was forged from a system of difference, just as the 70's, 60's, 50's and so on were. But, I don't hear you getting irritated about the tv show American Dreams, or remakes of I Dream of Genie. So, these melancholic repetitions are only noticed, in so far as you identify yourself as a part of a particular generation, which again, produces order, and in my view, thwarts political action.

It's all inauthentic, if by that we mean replicated. The goal becomes to figure out asubversive politics of replications, which, as it turns out, I am working on.