Deconstructing Youth

Youth Discourses at the Limits of Sense

F. Gabriel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137317520
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Young people are regularly posited as a threat to social order and Deconstructing Youth explores why. Applying Derridean deconstruction to case studies on youth sexuality, violence and developmental neuroscience, Gabriel offers a fresh perspective on how we might attend to 'youth problems' by recasting the foundations of the concept of 'youth'.

1

Introduction

The Australian Government’s ‘National Binge Drinking Strategy’ (2008–2010) sought to address the ‘binge drinking epidemic’ among the country’s youth (Australian Labor Party, 2008, np). Part of this strategy involved a confronting advertising campaign designed to shock young people about the impact of binge drinking, similar to campaigns targeting smoking, HIV/AIDS and the road toll. The campaign was also designed with a particular focus on personal responsibility. Using the tagline ‘Don’t turn a night out into a nightmare’, the campaign was ‘designed to encourage teenagers and young adults to think about the choices they make about drinking, and particularly the possible negative consequences of excessive alcohol consumption’ (Department of Health and Ageing, undated, np). However, the advertisements encouraging young people to take personal responsibility in regulating their own drinking behaviour were also designed, in the words of the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, to scare ‘the living daylights out of young people about the health impact of binge drinking’ (cited in Cooper, 2008, np). For example, a group of teenage boys are depicted joking around together by a city roadside until one is hit by a car; violence erupts in a nightclub over a spilled drink; a woman falls through a coffee table while drunk at a house party; another woman is photographed having sex in a park (Curry, 2008, np). Thus the campaign was organised in terms of two conflicting aims or logics: alongside expectations of personal responsibility and self-regulation – what might be considered expressions of adult-level rationality – was the paternalism of a scare campaign designed to elicit unreflective, fear-based compliance.

While this contradiction might simply speak to the inconsistencies of a particular political programme, it is perhaps symptomatic of a more general ambivalence that inheres in broader attitudes towards and even concepts of the identity of youth in the developed Western world. Underlying a conflicting desire to scare young people into acting in a particular way (even if that way is deemed ‘responsible’) and to encourage them to take personal responsibility for their own drinking choices is an uncertainty about what exactly youth is or means. Young people are treated here as being in need of guidance and instruction and as being capable of taking responsibility for themselves. This capability makes them like adults, but this capability is also imagined as something to be acquired, such that the lack of a particular social competence marks them as other than the fully functional adult subject that they are directed, even destined, to become. By the same token, the apparent inevitability of the transformation of young people into mature, rational adults posits a continuity that belies the marked distinction of youth’s ‘essential’ identity. Accordingly, youth is marked as a distinct life stage and identity category by virtue of its difference from what marks the category adult, but what youth ‘is’ is also its very becoming something else. What young people do that is taken to be particular to them is also what is leading them towards becoming something other than themselves. At the basic level of definition, then, there are contradictions in operation here: youth is simultaneously the same and different, distinct and emerging, central and marginal.

The very existence of such ambivalence and contradiction raises the possibility, if nothing else, of reading (Western) youth discourses in a way that is attentive to these contradictions and it is this possibility that I seek to explore in the following discussion. More particularly, I aim to reflect on how, where and why such contradictions go unnoticed, and to consider what might be gained from revealing such oversights. Surprisingly, perhaps, one source that might be helpful in beginning such a reading is John Hartley’s work on television. In Tele-ology (1992), Hartley utilises deconstructive theory to demonstrate the ways in which television texts challenge the purity and certainty of existing analytical categories and subject boundaries employed in textual analysis, revealing instead their conceptual ambiguity. As part of this reading, he describes the textual representation of youth as a particular example of ‘categorical ambiguity’ (1992, p. 31). Hartley explains that the opposing terms of a binary pair (such as ‘reader’ and ‘text’) are ordinarily understood to be mutually exclusive, but that closer inspection reveals that ‘there is a margin between the two that is ambiguous’, a margin that is ‘neither one thing nor the other, and both one and the other’ (1992, p. 31). For Hartley, the category of youth occupies one such ambiguous boundary or margin. It is marked by its difference from both child and adult (it is neither of these) but it also displays the attributes and potentialities of both. In this way, according to Hartley, youth serves to mark or make apparent the limit between the terms in the binary pair child/adult by existing as a ‘nominated ambiguous boundar[y]’ against an ex-nominated (naturalised, unnamed, assumed and implicit) centre – adult (1992, p. 31).

The category ‘child’ is, of course, also marked by its difference from an ex-nominated centre, and might thus be ‘read’ for what it says about adulthood, but the categories of ‘child’ and ‘youth’ each have different relationships to the category ‘adult’. As the binary opposite of adult, childhood is a more stable category than ‘youth’. The boundaries of childhood are drawn more clearly in comparison to youth which exists in mediation between ‘child’ and ‘adult’ and represents the transition between the two. We might say that childhood marks a socially legitimated zone of ‘purposelessness’, which is to say that the purpose of childhood is just to be a child. This notion of childhood is reflected in the Australian Federal Government’s ‘Early Years Learning Framework’ for early childhood education and care. First endorsed in 2009 by the Council of Australian Government (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, undated, np), the framework describes children’s play as enabling them ‘to simply enjoy being’ and such play provides ‘opportunities for children to learn as they discover, create, improvise and imagine’ (Bita, 2009, np). What then distinguishes ‘youth’ from ‘child’ is that the play that is used by children to explore, create and interpret the world around them is actually put to use. Such activity eventually becomes subject to the regulatory expectation that it be directed towards the goal, or purpose, of becoming adult. In this way, it may be said that there is a conflation between the categories of ‘child’ and ‘youth.’ As such, my focus on youth is not to the exclusion of the activities and concerns of childhood (for example, the preservation of innocence, what constitutes timely development), when the activities of childhood become subject to a specific set of expectations that characterise youth. There are, however, some noteworthy differences between the two terms which call for further elaboration.

As presented here, youth is like a ‘third’ term, the exclusion of which makes the child/adult ‘binary’ possible. But given that the binary is dependent on this prior exclusion, youth is also more like the ‘first’ term. Either way, however, it is through the ‘forgetting’ or ‘suppression’ of youth as (or at) the ambiguous boundary between the terms ‘child’ and ‘adult’ that each can appear as distinct forms of identity or subjectivity that are characterised by the absence of the attributes of the other (for example, a self-gratifying will versus dispassionate reason, or innocence versus worldliness). To use a Derridean term, youth is the ‘undecidable’ relation between, but also the condition of, the two, and this margin manifests in social contexts in terms of thinking about how a child becomes an adult. What must happen to bring about this transition? What must ‘youth’ ‘do’? What characteristics should young people therefore possess and not possess, and how is this shaped by gender, race, class and age? What happens ‘in between’ child and adulthood is quite important for it signals the future, the shape of the society to come, and to discuss youth reveals much about the dreams and investments of the wider culture.

There is, however, anxiety associated with this transition from child to adult. The category of youth ‘offends against binary logic’ (Hartley, 1992, p. 31) because, even as the category has been produced by that logic, the category transgresses the logic by having attributes that belong to both sides and to neither side of the binary (for example, child/adult, innocence/knowledge, irresponsible/responsible, unreason/reason). I argue that youth discourses as they operate in situated contexts unreflexively incorporate this contradictory foundation in the work of making sense of youth. This is important to understand because a common element which emerges from a close reading of youth discourses is a confidence in the ability to distinguish between youth and adult on the basis of their distinct qualities. Despite the fact that youth is an ambiguous category, it is possible to identify totalising assumptions and essentialist reductions underpinning discussion about youth. Discourses on youth sexuality, for example, operate from assumptions of biological and also emotional innocence, hence the anxiety over how and when it is appropriate to transition out or away from this state without causing harm by prematurely ending that ‘innocence’. What remains unseen here is the ambiguous margin that makes it possible to articulate such grounding assumptions and the binary positions from which interpretive work proceeds. So to treat youth as an exclusive and distinct identity category, despite its negative definition via the positively defined ‘adult’ and its other, ‘child’, is to allow for only a narrow and predictable range of constitutive and interpretive options regarding youth. More particularly, the effect of assuming an essential nature to youth is to have youth discourses fall short of their own explanatory demands.

To elaborate, this means that, as a concept, youth is produced from a child/adult binary, but the effect of this is to produce a subject position that cannot be contained within the available terms provided by the binary system. This excess is threatening to the system’s coherence, because it has not originated from any ‘outside’, but from within. The effect of this conceptual (dis)order, as I demonstrate in the chapters to follow, is that things considered ‘normal’ and necessary for youth to do (for example, reach physical, cognitive and emotional maturity; assert their independence; become sexually active) are also taken as dangerous, problematic or troublesome, and as grounds for disciplinary action to regulate youth behaviour. Crucially, these behaviours and actions are taken as having come from somewhere ‘outside’ (like the threat of strangers) and are treated as such. But to respond on the grounds that a dominant (internal) order is being threatened by something external to it is to fail to see that the existing explanatory framework requires for its intelligibility the same (antagonistic) subject position in order to be reaffirmed and restored. The effect of this process or structure, as I hope to show, is that the same problematic effects occur and the same arguments against youth are made over and over in a bid to restore order. Youth is posited as something threatening, a point of tension, and as potentially responsible for the collapse of social order, when its antagonistic position and function is also consistent with the dominant conceptual order; indeed, this position is the order’s founding condition of possibility.

When youth is defined as a threat in this way, and consequently treated as a social problem that needs to be ‘fixed’, the seemingly logical response is to call for more empirical research, more analysis and more policy (for example, more advertising campaigns on the dangers of binge drinking, the introduction of drug testing in schools to discourage teen drug use) in order to overcome the problem that young people pose. While research, analysis and policy action are all important and necessary, it may well be that part of the problem also lies with the founding concepts as much as any lack of empirical knowledge. At a conceptual level, the first principles governing the construction of youth – identity as distinct, binary logic as mutually exclusive – offer too little by assuming too much. These principles operate on an assumption or expectation that it is possible to rigorously or sufficiently identify the nature of youth. This assumption covers over the conditions on the basis of which such a position is made possible, such that the conceptual excess or ambiguous margin that is a condition of intelligibility of this assumption must be both ignored and implicitly relied upon. By following through on its own logic, this assumption must enforce certain explanatory limits or else risk its own intelligibility. The problem, then, is not a lack of knowledge as such, but a lack of awareness at a theoretical level of the manner of the constitution of ‘youth’ and the limits of that constitution’s own conceptuality.

In order to keep thinking youth, then, what is needed is a focus on how youth is thought, on how knowledge about youth is being constructed. In saying this I am assuming that the term ought to not be abandoned despite its problematic status. However, it may rightly be asked whether these issues would need to be dealt with if the term were to be eliminated altogether. Is the better solution to not think ‘youth’ at all, rather than go to so much effort to deconstruct it? After all, ‘youth’ is a term that quickly evaporates or is exhausted once it is used, because what it seeks to define and describe is not an essential presence but a movement, a transition. Youth is not child and not adult; it is becoming not child and becoming adult. None of this ‘is’ youth, so the category cannot be adequately defined. In other words, ‘youth’ is not where the word is located. But at the same time, there is a gap to be accounted for between child and adult. Empirically, child becomes adult, and this process happens with or without a notion of youth as it is understood in any particular cultural context. Theoretically, any explanation could be offered to explain how this process occurs, what it means and how it should or should not be facilitated, but abandoning the category of youth does not eliminate the empirical gap that exists here. The gap still needs to be accounted for even if only to nominate an age when childhood ends and adulthood begins. Accordingly, this analysis does not aim to do away with youth or with a concept of youth. It does not seek to change things by replacing a flawed logic with something less problematic, and it does not seek to ‘break’ with binary thinking in order to get to youth in (or as) a pure state of being. The aim, rather, is to reveal the blind spots in the existing logic and the tensions inherent in its constitution, and to pay attention to them in order to offer a more effective way of analysing, debating and negotiating existing ideals and expectations about youth (and how these ideals and expectations are understood and experienced according to differentiations of age, gender, race and class).

Approaching the question of youth deconstructively allows for this. Deconstructive theory has already been productively applied to questions of gender identity and the status of the colonial ‘other’, and youth shares some similarities with these areas. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, feminist and post-colonial theorists reveal how discourses of race and gender dominate and constrain their objects of study (women and racial others) based on an unacknowledged dependence on the subordinated identity category in order for the dominant subjectivities of men and the West to appear as pure, natural and inevitable. Similarly for youth, the categories of ‘child’ and ‘adult’ appear as a natural ground via an unrecognised dependence on ‘youth’ as the ambiguous margin between the two, and ideas about youth proceed as though produced from this binary distinction. Paying attention to these tensions opens up possibilities for working against the subordination of youth, as much as of women and racial others, in a way that does not simply reverse this condition (by instituting a reverse essentialism, for example). This focus offers ways of approaching identity that are responsive to the manner of its conceptualisation – to the contingencies in place that undermine assumptions of absolute self-presence and essential truth. In such an approach, the importance of identity is not lost, but neither can it be taken for granted.

My aim is to open up similar, but thus far unexamined, possibilities for youth. As this method is well-established in these other areas, I seek to adopt a similar methodology in analysing youth discourses as they operate in Western cultural contexts. Specifically, I draw on techniques from deconstruction which have underpinned much of the feminist and postcolonial analyses of subjectivity, identity and the ‘other.’ Utilising Jacques Derrida’s work and applying in particular the notions of undecidability, differance, iterability, supplementarity and the event, I trace the interpretive logic of dominant youth discourses in order to reveal their blind spots or conceptual tensions. I point to the excess of meaning these tensions create, which cannot be adequately explained or contained within available interpretive frameworks. I go on to offer a way of thinking youth that works with this antagonism but does not require the perpetuation of self-contradictory conceptual frameworks in order to keep existing orders intact. Paradoxically, it is in opening up the limits of youth discourses (the ex-nominated categories at play in producing dominant discourses of youth) that a less reductive and more responsive approach to understanding youth is enabled. It becomes possible to think youth more ‘directly’. That is, again paradoxically, to work against assumptions that posit a notion of direct access to oneself – essential difference, authentic identity, of context as ‘exhaustively determinable’, or where there is a saturation (not an excess) of meaning (Derrida, 1988, p. 18) – and to work with the contingencies that make a concept of youth possible (undecidability, supplementarity, trace and so on). With a greater reflexivity and a heightened awareness of discursive limits, there is an opportunity to address existing markers of youth (youth as the future, youth as becoming adult, youth as a distinct identity category and life stage), and the often troublesome behaviour these markers produce, in a way that does not necessarily risk the intelligibility of explanatory systems in making sense of youth. In other words, a deconstructive reflexivity does not demand an interpretation of youth that preserves discursive parameters by inadvertently creating the conditions for their ongoing self-displacement.

This is actually a way of making youth more meaningful and valuable, not less, even though it may not seem so at first. This work puts at risk certain essentialist assumptions about youth (youth as an inherent state, as innocence, biology as destiny), but doing so means getting closer to what youth discourses articulate in the first place – the process of becoming adult. It is also possible to explain and respond to issues such as youth violence, sexuality and cognitive maturation without losing sight of the very object of investigation due to an inability to contain the effects of youth discourses within essentialist frameworks. This is to say that the regulatory discourses and policy frameworks that are used to explain and respond to such issues – discourses around safe sex and alcohol consumption and policies on the treatment of young offenders – are shaped by certain ways of thinking about youth, and what deconstruction calls for is greater attention to and awareness of how these ways of thinking work. Seeking to approach youth deconstructively is not, therefore, about trying to present alternative discourses whose effects can be contained or controlled, but about bringing to the discussion of youth a greater responsibility for the effects of such talk. This awareness brings the possibility of thinking through the limits of existing ways of thinking, towards actually enacting the possibilities of youth that already exist.

Chapter 2 examines several dominant and influential ways of thinking and speaking about youth and analyses how they come up against their own conceptual limits. This is done by looking at a range of theoretical traditions that have contributed to dominant discourses on youth and how these traditions work to shape (and limit) how young people are thought and spoken about in both popular and academic contexts. The chapter does not attempt to provide an exhaustive analysis of youth theory; rather, it focuses on three theoretical traditions with the understanding that any attempt to articulate such an ambivalent category as youth must necessarily impose limits on the category and in turn be limited in its capacity to understand or explain youth.

The chapter opens with a description of two incidents that sparked controversy in the media and I identify the kinds of discursive responses they mobilised. I then consider the theoretical influences underpinning these discourses. I look at how youth is conceptualised by Enlightenment thinkers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by developmental theorists Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget, and then from a critical political economy perspective focusing on the work of Henry Giroux. Finally, I examine youth according to subculture and post-subculture theory. These theoretical strands contribute differently to youth discourse (by underpinning it or interrogating it), but across all of them is an underlying assumption of youth as an identifiable and animating form of subjectivity whether this form of subjectivity is understood as grounded in physiology or social location. I raise the question of what is at stake in this formation – what is lost, what is gained and why it matters.

Chapter 3 introduces deconstructive theory in taking up the question of what it means to approach youth in terms of identity when such definition comes via the prior definition of an adult subject. Deconstruction has been applied in interrogating the identity positions of women and racial others who have been similarly defined and I look to this work for what it can offer a reading of youth. Postcolonial and feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak argue that the assumptions on which a notion of identity is based (self-presence, fundamental difference) cannot adequately account for the subjectivity of marginalised people. They also suggest that dominant subjects are not self-sufficient, but depend on these subordinated positions in their appearance as natural. The work of these theorists provides a model for how to approach the question of identity in ways that are responsive to these issues and how to use such an approach to challenge dominant identity structures.

The next three chapters are case studie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The State of Contemporary Youth: Conceptual Underpinnings of Dominant Youth Discourses
• 3. Deconstruction and the Question of Identity
• 4. Reasonable Unreason: The Limits of Youth in the Teen Brain
• 5. Presumed Innocent: The Paradox of ‘Coming of Age’ and the Problem of Youth Sexuality
• 6. Normal Abnormality: Coming to Terms with Teen Violence and the Undecidability of Youth
• 7. Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index