Who gets a spot in the collective unconscious?
/Content Warning: Discussions of racism and homophobia./
Thanks to a series of events involving a broken button maker and my coworker being late, I managed to score myself a free ticket to Vancouver’s outdoor Shakespeare festival, Bard on the Beach. As I settled into my seat for a production of /Two Gentlemen of Verona/ and flipped through the program, I was rather interested in how the story would be affected by its new setting in the 80s. Such a complicated decade would surely bring to life a story that might otherwise feel distant to the average twenty-first century audience. Naïve as it was, I truly hoped that I was about to witness a nuanced reinvention of this tale of fickle young lovers. To my horror, what I endured was a truckload of nostalgic slop. I was deeply disappointed in the show’s lack of bravery and vision. Nevertheless, the show also left me feeling a special kind of bitterness unrelated to my many, many opinions on Shakespeare.
The 1980s were a tumultuous decade and a pivotal moment in world affairs. President Reagan in the United States and Prime Minister Thatcher in the United Kingdom implemented economic policies that have contributed greatly to the current affordability crisis experienced by millions around the world while millions died in a pandemic that went largely unaddressed because the main sufferers were queer, Black, poor, or some combination of the three. Meanwhile, as the Eastern Bloc was coming to its dramatic end, a proxy war and a famine ravaged Ethiopia, and Iran and Iraq endured eight years of conflict driven largely by American interests. This is not, however, the 80s of popular memory. For a privileged few, namely white American suburbanites, the 80s were a time of unprecedented prosperity and optimism marked by new technologies and colourful fashion trends, along with the reinforcement of conservative values through the nuclear family.
You may be asking yourselves why this even matters at all, and you may have a point. Maybe I’m just bitter because my immediate reaction to the 80s is to think of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Is it plausible, however, that something deeper is at play?
To help us in this exploration, I call upon Frantz Fanon’s /Peau noire, masques blancs/. For the first handful of chapters, Fanon uses his background in psychiatry to provide an analysis of internalised racism in Black Martinicans as well as colonised peoples more generally, examining the domains of language, interracial gender relations, and postcolonial politics. Then, in chapter six, he begins to synthesise his observations into his theory of the “Colonised Mind.” As part of this argument, he debunks the Jungian theory of an innate and universal collective unconscious, instead arguing that the collective unconscious is acquired in childhood. To illustrate this, he uses examples from the first five chapters of the book. One in particular explores how Antillean children (children from Martinique and other French Caribbean islands), repeatedly taught European history and values in school, are encouraged to identify with the colonisers rather than with themselves or their own heritage. This, he argues, helps explain how internalised racism develops and why Black people in colonised societies may adopt negative attitudes toward themselves and others.
Fanon argues that what we feed the collective unconscious will necessarily produce the conscious biases that emerge as the output. As previously mentioned, there are many different ways to remember the 80s, but it feels intentional that the 80s that we know in our collective memory is so often rose-tinted with nostalgia and cultural references that index a certain political class. Using a Fanonist model of the collective unconscious, we must ask the following question: what is the mind that is produced by this cultural input? The answer to that is much like the young Black Antillean child educated to identify with white colonisers; we can also contend 80s nostalgia to be a foundation for the collective unconscious that produces popular identification with the suburban white upper-middle class of that period.
Extending this concept to the economy of the 80s, many remember the decade as a time of personal and national prosperity, largely shaped by Reaganomics, which was widely perceived as benefiting ordinary Americans. In reality, however, nearly all of the wealth generated by these policies was concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals. People who struggle economically—then and now—are drawn to recall an era of optimism. Even though right-wing economic policies look very different today than they did in 1984, its goal is still to protect the interests of domestic capital. These policies are accompanied by a general reduction in social support but also reactionary social agendas—such as violent homophobia and racism—that reinforce the same exclusionary order. While most people are not hungry for a return to the policies of the 80s (true Reaganomics), they are very attracted to the aesthetics of the 80s (economic optimism and the white nuclear family).
There are many reasons to be concerned about nostalgia for the aesthetics of the 80s, not least of which is the fact that this past is a fiction for most of the population. There is
no return to this past, mainly because this past never was. From my perspective, a return to the 80s means an increase in violent homophobia and transphobia, intentional and systemic neglect of LGBTQ+, Black, unhoused, and addicted communities, and threats to our social security net. To put it particularly selfishly, what bothers me about 80s nostalgia is probably best summed up by Leo Bersani in his essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” where he states that “the general public is at once an ideological construct and a moral prescription. […] The family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister.”