Phenomenology of Youth Cultures and Globalization

Stuart R. Poyntz, Jacqueline Kennelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317961734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection brings together scholars who draw on phenomenological approaches to understand the experiences of young people growing up under contemporary conditions of globalization. Phenomenology is both a philosophical and pragmatic approach to social sciences research, that takes as central the meaning-making experiences of research participants. One of the central contentions of this book is that phenomenology has long informed critical empirical approaches to youth cultures, yet until recently its role has not been thusly named. This volume aims to resuscitate and recuperate phenomenology as a robust empirical, theoretical, and methodological approach to youth cultures. Chapters explore the lifeworlds of young people from countries around the world, revealing the tensions, risks and opportunities that organize youth experiences.

1
Introduction

Phenomenology of Youth Cultures and Globalization: Lifeworlds and Surplus Meaning in Changing Times

Jacqueline Kennelly and Stuart R. Poyntz¹

Introduction

Globalization is one of the central philosophemes of our era, a focal objectification of lived experience in space and time, and a concept that continues to help explain the fundamental dynamics of human experience today. Globalization references the ever-accelerating interconnections of diverse human lives at the political, economic, social and cultural levels. If at times the very ubiquity of the term can appear to leave the concept barren of meaning, we contend that it remains a fundamental resource for orienting ourselves in contemporary life. It is with this in mind that we have turned to phenomenology, a philosophical tradition with roots in early twentieth-century European thought, currently being reinvigorated across diverse disciplines as a crucial approach for tackling complex questions regarding lived experience, meaning-making processes and subjectivity. Phenomenology is concerned with the ways subjects orient to worlds through an array of symbolic articulations. In this edited collection we have sought to draw from phenomenology in order to specify how globalization is unfolding amongst young people living in various regions and under diverse conditions around the world. In so doing, we contend that phenomenology and phenomenologically imbued modes of analysis can help us to better diagnose the present and future by ‘thickening up’ our understanding of the sense-making practices deployed by young people in the current period of asymmetrical globalization.

In turning to phenomenology to understand how young people are living out their contemporary lives, we intend to keep central the body of evidence which makes clear that globalization has unfolded within social networks, among communities and within the complexities of the new global metropolis through novel and profound forms of inequity. We contend, however, that all of us—young and old, those from the global North and South—are also already agents in and of globalization. Consequently, young people in particular would appear to have existential evidence “at ontic and mundane levels” of what it means to live, survive and even flourish under the constraints of a new global order (Mendieta, 2007, 40). In saying this, we do not wish to privilege youth voice as a medium of truth. Rather, we contend that because the particular, subjective accounts of young people are always symbolically enacted in a specific space and time, they contain what Paul Ricoeur (1976) would call a “surplus of meaning,” an excess through which it becomes possible to chart the social imaginaries of youth cultures unfolding in the new and oftentimes perilous circumstances of global futurity. Richard Kearney (2004, 86) explains that social imaginaries refer to what Ricoeur understood as:

That body of collective stories, histories and ideologies which inform our modes of socio-political action. Social imagination … is constitutive of our lived reality. … [But this means t]he social imagination serves both an ideological role of identification and a utopian role of disruption. The former preserves and conserves; the latter projects alternatives.

Where globalization is a worldview or philosopheme, it is also a system through which individual lifeworlds are structured in particular ways: Most profoundly today, this has included a de-structuring of older lifeworlds, the result of which is the development of “processes that have given rise to new horizons of experience and expectation” (Mendieta, 2007, 20).

The task of this book, then, is to draw on phenomenologically informed inquiries to describe youth experience as it is lived in the context of globalization, to understand the patterns of meaning that emerge in the midst of the totality of human being-in-the-world (Heidegger, [1927] 1962). To do this, a key objective is to identify young people’s “symbolic worlds as a detour through [which] other spatial, structural, moral and temporal narratives and registers” might be addressed (Dillabough and Kennelly, 2010, 51). Thereby, the ‘boundedness’ of young people in the context of global life, including that which is preserved and conserved, and those social, political and cultural possibilities that are emergent among contemporary youth, might be revealed.

Intersubjectivity, Embodiment, Temporality and Meaning-Making

Amongst its many contributions, phenomenology offers a means by which to attend to the directly lived experiences of young people within globalizing times without succumbing to the temptation of positing their experiences as ahistorical or fragmented. As has often been the case in youth research that relies on postmodernist or ‘voice-centered’ interpretations of young people’s experiences, a focus on identity, transitions, and individualization can render young people’s lives as separated from the structures and histories that shape them. Phenomenology, on the other hand, permits the focus of meaning-making to rest with the experiences of the youth themselves, but does not end there, for “the problem of meaning is a time problem” (Schutz, [1932] 1967, 12). That is, rather than taking the experiences of youth under globalization as an exemplar case of detraditionalization (Beck, 2009; Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994), phenomenology permits an analysis that focuses on contemporary meaning-making processes within the context of a much larger historical frame. It thus posits such experiences as emerging from a past, while lived in the present. At the same time, the centrality of globalization as an organizing structure helps to reveal what has been recalibrated, shifted, and/or dissolved under social relations that must account for the intensification of global flows of information, finance, and (in some cases) bodies (Appadurai, 1996, 2013).

At the core of a phenomenological approach to young people’s lives is the recognition of the centrality of intersubjectivity within human experience, what Arendt (1958) calls the “web of relations” that bind together a plurality of people across a shared horizon of social life. Intersubjectivity draws attention to the specific way consciousness and intentionality are taken up in phenomenology. Neither term should be interpreted in an idealist sense, in relation to the subject as ‘universal thinker,’ as “the positing power who subjects the manifold to the law of the understanding, in so far as [she] is to be able to put together a world” (Merleau-Ponty, 2004, 74). In phenomenology, subject and world dwell in each other. Husserl’s early supposition (e.g., see The Cartesian Meditations or Ideas) that the contingency of meaning might be escaped by a reduction to “the pure immanence of a transcendental subjectivity” is thus not of interest here (Kearney, 2004, 15). We begin rather from Ricoeur’s assumption (shared by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and the later Husserl) that consciousness is always finite. It is born in the wash of a language horizon “whose meanings precede our own subjective creations” (ibid., 16). This move aligns our work with various analyses of young people’s social being today. What phenomenology brings to the analysis of subject and world is, however, a focus on meaning. But in phenomenology meaning-making processes are always understood to be oriented toward or around something, which is another way of saying “consciousness is always directed toward objects and hence is always worldly, situated and embodied” (Ahmed, 2006, 544). Intersubjectivity thus refers to a necessary intimacy between subject and world. And because young people’s symbolic articulations are necessarily of the world, “phenomenology is the attempt to articulate the ‘operative intentionality’ that is antecedent to conscious thought” (Merleau-Ponty, 2004, 63). The task before us is not just to describe youth lives, then, but to interpret what they simultaneously conceal about the machinations of global life.

The consequence of this is that phenomenology requires of us, as researchers and as fellow human beings, to approach our interpretation of the other via what Schutz ([1932] 1967) refers to as durée— life as experienced across time and space, belonging to each one of us as individuals but also residing within a shared social world. Under phenomenology, the concepts we are working with begin to change; common sociological and cultural themes are taken up differently.

For instance, we can talk about the public (as Arendt does), but ‘publicness’ in a phenomenological sense is understood to be a creatively co-constituted space of interconnections, activities, stories and effects through which our appearances together constitute threads of human possibility. Pubic life is not strictly about rational communication oriented toward a Habermasian consensus, in other words, nor is it about something ‘out there,’ a space to be designed by careful urban planning or prudent politicians (Bridge and Watson, 2011). Public life is about speech and action that counteract thoughtlessness and produce spaces of communicative plurality that reveal the contingencies and materialities that affect people’s ability to act with others (Poyntz, 2012; Gallagher, this volume; Asthana, this volume). Roger Silverstone (2002, 766) captures this well when he writes: “The possibility of public life depends on the mutuality of seeing and hearing [others] and seeing and hearing depends on the recognition of both difference and identity amongst those involved in the interaction.”

Phenomenology also addresses measures of time and temporality, but here again, such measures are understood within the everyday, as each is experienced through the body, language and human relationships (Rasmussen, this volume; Taylor, this volume). Within youth cultures these temporal aspects might manifest as tattoo designs or the lingering resilience of certain subcultural taunts, changing yet constant, not emerging from nowhere yet also constantly interpellated through the subjective experiences of those creating meaning in that particular moment.

How else then, except through phenomenology, can we account for the manner in which the past lives through us in the present, embodied through everyday meaning practices that rely on interlocking webs of relationships? And how better to account for both the flux and sedimentation of globalization’s effects on young people, where global flows meet futurity and the stubborn resilience of social structures that reproduce persistent inequalities that plague our globalized world? Certainly the social sciences have grappled with the monumental changes happening at an unprecedented pace under high modernity (of which globalization is one aspect). Ulrich Beck’s (2009; see also Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994) detraditionalization thesis is but one (albeit highly influential) theoretical approach that has attempted to account for the rapidity of global change and its meaning for social systems. Under the detraditionalization thesis, the ties that bind societies have loosened, emphasizing risk and contingency but also possibilities and the chance to re-make one’s own biography. A phenomenological approach to globalized social contexts, on the other hand, questions the ‘newness’ of ‘new times’ (Hall, 1996a), re-attaching them to the reins of history, the body and an interlocking web of human relationships. “Knowing that there has always been flow, exchange, and mixture across social boundaries in human history,” (Appadurai, 2013, 65), we take seriously the need for the longue durée. Not succumbing to the temptation to account for complex social lives through a singular or linear trajectory, phenomenological approaches to youth cultures permit a complex accounting of the constellations of contemporary youth experiences. Such constellations contain the residues of a deep past, but of course there is little doubt that the speed of cultural exchange has accelerated in the new millennium, as “global cultural flows have lost [their] selective and cumbersome qualities,” which for so long mitigated their transit across the arc of human history (ibid., 63). In contrast, today global flows—whether political, cultural, social or economic—are a constant factor in young lives, and as the chapters in this collection indicate, they give shape and form to the production of local subjectivities and conditions under which youthful lives unfold.

Situating Phenomenology within Youth Cultural Theory

One of the central contentions of this collection is that phenomenology has long informed critical empirical approaches to youth cultures, yet until recently its role has not been thusly named. Part of our project, then, is to resuscitate and recuperate phenomenology as a robust empirical, theoretical and methodological approach to youth cultures. Some of the seminal influences on youth cultural theory have come from theorists who themselves disavow or understate their links to phenomenology, and yet whose work lends itself directly to phenomenological approaches. Pierre Bourdieu is the most prominent of these. Right up until the year of his death, he declared that his work was not phenomenological (see Bourdieu’s response to Throop and Murphy, 2002), and yet subsequent theorists throughout the social sciences have linked Bourdieu’s highly complex and influential corpus to that of various phenomenologists (e.g., Charlesworth, 2000; Throop and Murphy, 2002). In developing her study of queer bodily orientations, for instance, Ahmed (2006, 552) notes that “[p]henomenology helps us explore how bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment, their posture, and their gestures.” She ties her concerns to that of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who argue that bodily orientations are forms of “sedimented histories,” and to Bourdieu, who describes such orientations as part of the habitus, the “ ‘system of durable, transposable, dispositions,’ which integrate past experiences through the very ‘matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions’ that are necessary to accomplish ‘infinitely diversified tasks’ ” (ibid., 552–553; Bourdieu, quoted in text).

In a different way, we also note connections between Paulo Friere and phenomenology. Long a formative influence in the fields of youth studies, critical pedagogy and media education (cf. Giroux, McLaren, Soep and Chávez, etc.), the central Frierean notion of dialogic pedagogy is more often than not interpreted in relation to a Hegelian dialectic of conscientizacion. In this way Friere is attached to a tradition of immanent critique that runs through Kant to Hegel to Marx to the Frankfurt School, and so on. Here, critical consciousness emerges in the interchange between students and teachers as part of a problem-posing process wherein both parties experience forms of liberation through their connection with others. Duarte (2000) argues, however, that Friere’s unique category of critical consciousness rests on a deeper form of inter-relatedness between dialogic subjects, one where student and teacher are understood to engage in a process of joining their expressions and thinking. Rather than a dialectic of self and other, here “the dialogic and communicative basis of problem-posing yields an experience of co-intentionality that is akin to a plurality of subjects thinking together as One ” (Duarte, 2000, 186; emphasis in original). The upshot of this for youth research is that a Frierean-inspired pedagogy may have less to do with the production of a dialectic of immanent truth, and more to do with the way worldliness and a rich and full sense of the real are enabled through critical pedagogy and media education (c.f. Asthana, this volume; Hoechsmann and Poyntz, 2012; Silverstone, 2007; and Curtis, 1999).

Another highly influential theorist of contemporary culture is Raymond Williams, considered one of the ‘founding fathers’ of British Cultural Studies, from which youth cultural studies sprung. His seminal concept of “structures of feeling” (Williams, 1977) is easily co-locatable with phenomenological approaches, referencing as it does the process by which agents individually embody broader social structures. And Paul Willis’s (1977) Learning to Labour, one of the most widely read and cited works of youth cultural theory, seeks to explain the everyday experiences of young men in 1970s Britain through an account of their everyday meaning-making practices, linking them to histories and structures highly reminiscent of phenomenological concerns (and, not coincidentally, using the work of Pierre Bourdieu to do so).

As the second director of the highly influential Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the UK, Stuart Hall has also played a formative role in shaping cultural studies more broadly, and youth cultural studies specifically. In his (2007) most extensive discussion of how phenomenology and cultural studies converge, Hall focuses on the phenomenological work of Schutz and the development of the sociology of knowledge in the American academy. He counters this development with the emergence of ideology critique in the Marxist tradition, and finds phenomenology lacking, particularly where the latter is conceived as the study of “th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Phenomenology of Youth Cultures and Globalization: Lifeworlds and Surplus Meaning in Changing Times
• SECTION 1 Intersubjectivity: Oneself and Another
• SECTION 2 Experience and Meaning-Making: Oneself and the World
• SECTION 3 Embodiment and Temporality: Oneself and Time
• Contributors
• Index