xXx/GTO paper is almost finished. It has turned into a cracker. I hope it is still suitable for the journal.
This may appear a bit stupid, but I think now I would’ve preferred to have written a thesis length version of this xXx/Gto paper as my thesis. There is so much stuff here to talk about. For starters, the overlap between the automotive industry and popular culture has yet to be explored properly. Some of my key points in my thesis to do with the ‘cultural economy’ are brilliantly exemplified in the case of the Pontiac GTO and the role it has played in popular culture. My head spins with all of the connections between different fields, histories, critical approaches and so on.
I could imagine a similar book to the famous introductory DuGuy text on the Sony Walkman, but on the Pontiac GTO. It would sell in the US for sure…
One of the undercurrent points of my paper that I did not have the space to properly elucidate relates to Deleuze’s argument on the multi-seriality of any series (in The Logic of Sense). If I have time I will post up some thoughts here.
The most interesting thing for me about the Pontiac GTO is how it ties together so many different dimensions of popular culture — cars, popular history, movies, music, and so on — while ostensibly being merely a ‘car’, and hence hardly ever thought of as an artefact of popular culture. Probably a better example than a blockbuster movie franchise, the Pontiac GTO is another form of what I am now calling a ‘cultural franchise event‘. Each iteration of the GTO across different milieus actualises the ‘pure event’ of the GTO in different, but repeated ways.
Chapter in a book on Cultral Franchise Events, maybe?