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Virtual Youth
an education of media,
and youth pop cultures/sub-cultures
John Schostak
Youth 2000
International Conference, University of Teeside (July)
1995
Introduction
There are two key words I want to explore as a framework for thinking about
issues to do with media and the cultures of young people - these words are: 'education'
and 'virtual'. In the title
to this paper education is used in a slightly strange way. It speaks of an education of media just
as one would say, a philosophy of media or a sociology of media. Yet, education is not typically employed
in such a way. So I should explain
what I mean by it.
It has always struck me as strange that where sociologists may do a
sociology of education, it doesn't make much sense to most people to talk of
doing an education of sociology.
Education is often thought of in terms of its functions as a social
institution providing a service.
It is rarely thought of as a critical discipline in its own right
offering critiques of social forms and of other academic disciplines. I have written of education as a
critical perspective and will not dwell on it here (Schostak 1989). Suffice it to say that for me an
educational perspective sets in train explorations of the processes through
which images, forms of thought and discourse, systems of belief, identities,
forms of expression and courses of action are made open to alternative ways of
perceiving or organising experiences for personal and social expression, action
and enjoyment. I do not intend
this statement to be an exhaustive definition of what I mean but rather as an
invitation to look beyond the current deployments of the term.
In brief, education as I use it is an invitation to explore the possible
in relation to their possibilities for realisation. Unlike contemporary schooling which now is a service
industry charged with the delivery of a National Curriculum, education has
nothing whatsoever to do with servicing the needs of political or any other
kind of vested interests.
The relationship between education and the virtual becomes obvious in
the notion of the play with possibility (Schostak 1988, 1989). A virtual world is essentially a
possible world. That is to say, it
is enough to imagine its existence for it to be a focus for the play of ideas
and images. There have always been
virtual worlds of this kind whether of dream, myth and fiction on the one hand
or the worlds of science which paint theoretical representations of curved
space, branching time and multiple universes. A virtual reality is an artificial reality in this
sense. The media in general and
the computer in particular, however, now offer to the public on demand virtual
worlds of increasing complexity and seduction. This is true of computer technology in particular which can
create images of rooms, houses, cities, indeed worlds within which people
coupled to their terminals through electronic gloves and helmets can see around
them, move within and engage with the objects of that world as if they were
real. This is the world which has
been called cyberspace, a term coined by the science fiction writer William
Gibson and has been described by Benedikt (1991: 122-3) :
cyberspace is a globally networked,
computer sustained, computer-accessed, and computer generated,
multidimensional, artificial, or 'virtual' reality. In this reality. to which every computer is a window, seen
or heard objects are neither physical nor, necessarily, representations of physical
objects but are, rather, in form, character and action, made of data, of pure
information. This information
derives in part from the operations of the natural, physical world, but for the
most part it derives from the immense traffic of information that constitute
human enterprise in science, art, business, and culture.
In the worlds of cyberspace the self and how it is represented takes on
new meanings and dimensions.
Cyberspace is not yet a fully realised phenomenon. However, it is this phenomenon which
I
want to have as my point of reference for an educational analysis and critique
when I speak of 'virtual youth'. I
see its contemporary manifestations in the satellite and cable television, the
development of fibre optics and the internet which are providing global
infrastructures for the creation of cyberspace. These can support many different televisual
constructions of youth. What I
want to explore, albeit in sketch form, are the contemporary views on the real
and the imaginary in media construction of youth. This will involve looking at the implications of modernist
and postmodernist accounts of the real for education virtual worlds hold in
their thrall the material world in a way that makes problematic our notions of
what counts as real. What I mean
by this, I hope, will emerge as my talk proceeds from real to virtual youth.
From Real to Virtual Youth
We all think we know what we mean by reality and in particular our own
biological reality. It is that
knowledge that makes us look both ways before we cross the road. It is this commonsensical basis
to our notions of reality that lend support to the view that if only we can
improve our mathematics and our scientific procedures sufficiently then we can
construct a full map of everything in the universe and give explanations of how
it works and thus provide solutions to all the social and physical problems of
the world. It has been this dream
that has led to the remarkable successes of science during the previous two
centuries in combating many deadly diseases, producing mountains of surplus
foods, offering seemingly endless choice to consumers and initiating the age of
space exploration.
It is in this world that people are born and their bodies mature, age,
die. As Carol, a young woman of
fifteen (in an off-site school for emotionally and behaviourally disturbed
children) whose fear was age said:
'Life is pathetic.'
'Why?'
She responded by shrugging and staring at the
ceiling. Then she said: 'Well, let's face it. You're born. You grow up.
You develop tits. Boys
screw you. You have babies. And you die. What a waste of time.
It's pathetic.'
(Schostak and
Logan 1994:1)
Most people will recognise something of the real in this little
narrative whether or not they want to read into it and also accept the weight
of resignation, hopelessness and injustice that hangs at its heels. Perhaps if sociologists, psychologists,
politicians, economists and all the other professionals given the legal right
to interfere in the lives of others could get their social calculations correct
a utopia could be created and her life would take on new meaning. But they haven't.
Hers is the real world.
Like it or not, this world of material disappointments has defied all
grand utopian designs whether socialistic or capitalistic. It is argued, of course, that school
was never meant to transform her life experience. Its social function is to reproduce society in all its
forms, to ensure that white middleclass children (particularly males) get
middleclass jobs (Willis 1977).
Cynical or not, it is a formula that is as broadly true today as it was
fifty or even a hundred years ago.
The way in which the
formula is articulated has of course changed in response to the
transformations in society brought about by increasing technological
sophistication since the industrial revolution, the two world wars, the Cold
War and the so called New World Order of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
rise of the Pacific Basin, the global activities of multinational business, and
the development of global information networks and media empires. Somewhere in all of this is Carol. her sense of reality is a product of
the technologies and the politics and the economics of the imaginary.
Like her, what we know of this changing world is secondhand at best,
mediated through the images of the global media corporations and the ragged
curricula of schooling. In the
early years of the twentieth century, many thought that it was possible to use
the new sciences and technologies of the real to design new worlds in the image
of socialist, democratic or capitalistic ideals. For example, I was told by residents of a purpose built new
town that when they moved into it from their slums in the early 1960s that they
really believed the dream of a New Jerusalem being built (Schostak 1983).
In the design of such a dream young people, of course, are on the front
line. Their views of the world are
both critical and irrelevant.
Critical in the sense that they represent the future and the vested
interests of today's powerful are what is continually at stake for them in the
future. As individuals,
however, their views are
irrelevant, even pathetic, as Carol said, because for individuals to make a
national or a global difference seems impossible.
We are all used to being members of a mass, placed into standardised
groups and processed along factory lines.
Contemporary schooling has evolved out of factory models (Hamilton
1980). With group solidarity, of
course, the mass is powerful as trade unionists and politicians well know. How each individual sees his or herself
in relation to the mass thus becomes critical for political control. Schooling in the nineteenth century as
an instrument of social control through the molding and fashioning of minds was
one such response. Combined with
the emergence of mass print media contributed to the construction of what
Anderson (1983) has called an 'imaginary community'. Newspapers reporting on Colonial adventures constructed an
image of nationalism, of British culture, of what it means to be British in
control of an empire. From these
images people could construct a sense of the world and Britain's place in
it. They could construct the sense
of belonging to a nation composed of millions of people all united under the
flag of Britishness. this, despite
the fact that no single individual will never meet more than a few of these
many millions. Newspapers provided
the images of mediation which could transform a mass of unrelated individuals
into a unified mass directable for particular social, economic and political
goals. These images which unify a
sense of fragmentation and difference construct in effect a virtual community. One could call it the Modernist project
to bring the mass under the control of the rational deployment of the sciences
and technology. The project makes use of the well known processes of
psychological identification.
Lacan, for example, described the mirror stage in the life of the child
as the phase when the fragmented inner experiences of the body become unified
under the externally reflected image of the body as a whole. This could come about in the
reflections of a real mirror, or the mirrors of language. Taking the processes of
identification and imaging to the symbolic level, unified images focus on a key symbol: a flag, the crown, or a national
game. Such images become symbols
of the good, the true, the right.
Thus, in effect, the ideal and the deviant are both constructed through
this enterprise of imaginary identification. The features accepted as ideal representations define what
it means to grow up to become a British person, an All American Girl or Boy, a
citizen. One does not grow
up naturally to become All American nor to know which side to cheer for at a
cricket match. It requires a
systematic and pervasive process of schooling. The politics of the imaginary are critical in schooling. Since print media could portray any
image giving, say the working classes access to subversive ideas, then
schooling and the media become powerful political tools with the key purpose
being to distribute socially approved images of identities and subject
positions.
However, with the proliferation of information technologies control of
access to images, information and ideas has increased demands for
regulation. The rise of the
National Curriculum can be read as a response to the increasing sense of loss
of control over a national identity, and over the forming and fashioning of
minds which unregulated access to information implies. This sense of a loss of control
generates a sense of panic. This
sense of panic is typically focussed around the young. It arises as the failure of the
modernist project of youth which schooling essentially represents.
The Failure of the Modernist Project of Youth
It is through the agencies notably of family, schooling, media, and
politics that the modernist project of youth is accomplished. The project is about designing youth in
as a key dimension of what I have termed elsewhere the Happy Family (Schostak
1993). The Happy Family is what
may be called an overdetermined image.
The image of the Happy Family can be arrived at from many different
starting points. It may be found
in adverts for a soap powder, sitcoms, political manifestos, media stories
about the decline of family values or school curricula on the role of sex,
health and moral education in schools.
Schooling in defining what youth is, also defines what a family should
be. The modernist project of youth
has as its goal the transformation of the raw materials of the young into a
socially approved product. This is
a world where the architect Le Corbusier (1929) could produce plans for the
city of light where all roads go straight to their goals, where natural
meandering lines are a sign of laziness and lack of will. It is a world where Skinner (1976)
could dream of a behaviouristically engineered city and the new right of the
1980s could dream of perfect, rational
markets where all social and economic problems would be solved by the
rational decisions of the market place.
However, all such transformations of the raw leave behind a residue of
waste material. The pure is not
produced without a cost. Clean
electric power from nuclear power has as its cost the radioactive waste that
remains a permanent danger to future generations.
The modernist project of youth reveals its failure most markedly in the
images of youth unemployment, poverty, race and sex discrimination, violence
and disaffectedness. The New Town
I mentioned earlier had by the 1980s an international reputation for violence,
crime, poverty and unemployment.
The riots in the early 1980s together with the pitched battles with
strikers such as those with the miners at Orgreave cannot be reconciled with
images of symbolic unity and national identity. This of course does not prevent
a resort to illusory strategies as a defence mechanism. However, it does mean that there is a
real split between the images of socially or politically approved forms of
identity and the needs and interests that have been excluded these forms of
identity. The poor and the
socially discriminated against are not in a position to enjoy the rights and
powers that identification with socially and politically approved images gives
to the wealthy, the employers, and the political rulers. Coerced or conditioned into submissive
allegiance to the prevailing codes of the powerful, the powerless must repress
their own desires to enjoy what the powerful enjoy. Similarly, in order to peacefully enjoy the privileges of
power, the powerful must repress any desires which do not conform to the
approved symbols. In each case,
subjective experience is split through the process of identification with the
prevailing symbols.
I have discussed elsewhere this kind of split in the sense of self
between the images of the Happy Family and the feelings, desires, and needs
ÔrefinedÕ out of the picture (Schostak 1993). Within this picture young people are both seen as a new
chance to produce society in the image of the refined ideals yet also as
representing a danger that they will fail to be refined because they are
vulnerable to the urges and desires whipped up by the unscrupulous. The
modernist project of schooling is to make this period of youth and in particular
adolescence safe in the interests of a system that designs the organisation and
distribution of wealth and power in the interests of the few rather than that
of the many. The refined ideals of
modernism are fed by myths, myths of technological progress, myths of heroism,
myths of exploring the unknown, myths of sacrifice drawn from older myths of
gods, myths of labour and of revolution amongst many others. We are possessed by the everyday
expressions of the narratives of these key myths. They can be found in the sitcoms, soaps, sci-fi adventures
as well as in the newspaper editorials, school curricula and political
manifestos. However, this is only
half the picture of modernism. It
is the picture its apologists would represent, leaving out the repressed
contents. Scholes (1995 WWW) in
comparing the works of Picasso and Joyce as the defining representatives of
modernism in art and literature, pointed to the underlying myth that they
shared, the myth of the Minotaur and came up with a phrase which I want to
dwell on when he wrote: 'As the Minotaur, raging against his imprisonment in
the labyrinths of tradition, Picasso shares the same myth of self-definition
as Joyce, as the indefatigable builder of new labyrinths in which to capture
in a
web of words the monstrosity of modern life.'
The modernist project of schooling is just this endeavour to hide and
yet indulge the monstrosity of modern life through webs of words of
progress. Popular culture provides
examples and opportunities to express this sense of the essential monstrosity
of modernity. They reveal
something of the essential structure of fantasy which splits the rational,
'civilised' form of the socially gendered, classed and ethnically grouped individual from the
repressed, hidden yet still indulged energies, desires, needs which remain as
subjective experience of that individual however unconscious. Thus in the modernist project the
subject is split between the rationally engineered product for living and the
rejected/abjected/repressed/ignored/unassimilable object of pleasure that Lacan
named the objet petit a. What we
need is a sideways glance at the modernist project to reveal the structure of
fantasy which lies at its margin, forming
its 'behind the frame' and 'outside the frame'.
Such a sideways glance, or looking awry as Zizek (1991) called it, can
be accomplished by studying the panics induced by youth popular culture. We have only to think of the many
films, pop groups, gang fights, riots and so on which have caused outrage in
the media. This essential
monstrosity gives rise to what, employing an approach of KrokerÕs (1989 WWW),
may be called Panic Adolescence which in turn leads to calls for curricular
responses that can be called panic curricula.
Panic Adolescence and Panic Curricula
Arthur Kroker has described panic as 'the key psychological mood of
postmodern culture' (1989
WWW). Panic adolescence reveals
through each instance of panic the essential structure of fantasy underlying
the processes of schooling.
For example, Forman (1933) saw the cinema as a major system of mass
schooling, locating it within a struggle between competing curricula, the
curricula of the good Family as distinct from that of the Cinema which - within
its darkened halls - opened the eyes to the darker elements of society. He was anxious about the sympathy that
many adolescents expressed for the criminals and the poor portrayed by film and
warned that 'the sharp barriers between right and wrong, built up by other
institutions and training, as in the home, the church and the school, are
progressively eroded and undermined, and some young people are made tolerant
toward crime and the criminal' (p. 183).
This begins to develop an idea of the importance of the underlying
fantasies concerning youth in society. So for example, Weinberger (1995 WWW):
The typical sitcom has always taken some
type of family unit and then showed us week by week how members of that family
learn valuable moral lessons.
Sometimes the family unit is a single dad with three sons; at other
times its a nanny or housekeeper raising a boy and a girl. As for the values promulgated,
sometimes its the youngest child learning that cheaters never prosper; at other
times it is the father learning that his children are not little babies anymore. Point being that while the language and
attitude of sitcoms may have evolved, the genre as a whole has been consistent
in the types of information conveyed.
We as audience members have been inundated season by season with the
same messages (literally the same messages; sitcoms recycle the very same year
after year, simply applying the lessons to its own characters).
It is a theme that I developed in Dirty Marks (Schostak 1993) by
regarding schooling as a process of moulding and fashioning of minds and
behaviour through in particular the institutions of family, school, church,
media, law and order. The
fantasies become clearer in the moral discourses of the new right by such
people as Anthony OÕHear who incidentally is a member of the new Teacher Training
Agency. He is writing about the
vexed question of sex education in tones that recall the aptness of Kroker's
term 'Panic Sex' as an uncontrollable, pervasive force from which the young
need to be protected:
The law is clearly designed to protect young
people from being preyed on by older people, and also to reinforce parental and
moral prohibitions on under-age sex.
It thus backs up family values and common
sense. It recognises the power of
sexuality, especially among adolescents, and the need to place it in a stable
context, in which it may develop as an expression of love and of the sacredness
of life.
.......
Sex education is subversive because it is
all too often based on the assumption that young teenagers will engage in
sexual activity, whatever the law, and the best way to deal with the problem is
to seek to mitigate the consequences.
He complained that
When John Patten was Education Secretary
he was bold enough to say that teachers who gave contraceptive advice to under
16-year-olds should be liable to criminal prosecution. He was firmly slapped down by a
representative of the Family
Planning Association. 'Teachers need support to carry out the very
difficult job of dealing with teenage sexuality,' she said.
(Daily Mail
21 November 1994)
In short, schools are failing to complete their rightwing defined
modernist project To the new
right, of course, it was all the fault of the trendy left wing ideas and the
permissiveness of the 1960s. The
Left wing modernists would of course tell a different story of socialist
governments failing to be left wing enough. At the time of writing the battle is still being engaged
with the same fury and enthusiasm as the Daily Mail July 18, 1995 has as its
major front page story the news that Dr Nick Tate the governmentÕs chief
curriculum advisor has given a speech on the theme that children should be
taught to be British and according to the Daily Mail reporter that Ôteachers
must also try to halt the rising tide of crime by instilling a code of moral values
in their pupilsÕ. This has come at
a time when Michael Howard the Home Secretary is calling for teachers amongst
other professionals to be taught to recognise and report illegal immigration. The mechanisms of exclusion and of
purity are clearly again being overhauled and oiled in the hope of developing a
totalised system of surveillance and control in order to keep the boundaries
between Us and Them clear and clean.
In other contexts such mechanisms have contributed to the cultural
panics that have resulted in ethnic cleansing.
Nevertheless, this structural similarity is one which is, in the
apologist rhetorics, forbidden to recognise. This theme of the forbidden recognition of structural
similarities again is one that I have explored elsewhere (1993). Its importance lies in the construction
of double coded structures which provide the forbidden enjoyment of repressed
contents by acts of moralisation, or through covert indulgence, or through a
play of irony. Newspapers which
moralise about pornography on the one hand yet sensationalise it in stories of
the adulterous affairs of politicians, priests and film stars provide the
enjoyment of a doubly constructed fantasy: the fantasy viewed from a moral perspective, together with
the fantasy savoured voyeuristically and vicariously in the pictures, the
detailed reportage and the kiss-and-tell stories that follow.
The doubly structured fantasy depends upon the essential impossibility
of the right wing modernist project to transform the raw materials of youth
into a rationally and morally clean and pure product. It thus depends upon maintaining the split in subjectivity
so that the fantasy is continually re-manufactured. It is typical of the 'kids today' narrative which is
monotonously recycled of which the following in the Daily Mail is an example:
THIS week a Mori poll revealed that
two-thirds of young people no longer know right from wrong, and few of them can
even name three of the Ten
Commandments. Even more depressing is the fact that only half of
them believe that there are
any definite rights and wrongs.
Meanwhile, we learn that half of all 15-year-olds have
tried an illicit
substance and there are young drug dealers
within schools. Addicts, still
not in their teens, are being counselled,
and children of seven are
experimenting with LSD, Ecstasy and
amphetamines.
Too many adolescents have no guidelines, no personal
rules to follow, no inner disciplining voice which helps them to keep on the
straight and
narrow. Once, those of us who were unable
to resist a dare and stole a sweet
from a Woolworth's counter were haunted
for months afterwards by feelings of
wickedness and a belief that hell-fire and
damnation were in imminent danger
of being wreaked upon our heads.
Today, any thieving nine-year-old is more likely to be
stealing glue, not
toffees, and feeling triumphantly clever,
not ashamed, if he gets away with
it. Insidiously over the years it's as
though the power has passed to the
children and out of the hands of adults.
12 Oct 94 Lynda
Lee-Potter
The clear split in subjectivity as between what children ought to be and
what they are is here very clear.
The subject is split between a conscience that would haunt the wrong
doer and the seemingly natural but base attraction to the child of being
incapable of resisting the dare to steal a sweet. This internal subject split
is paralleled by the splits at the cultural level between those who should
teach right from wrong such as teachers and parents, and those who fail to do
this and those who actively do the tempting. In short, these subject positions
are to be held together by the moral narratives of hellfire and damnation. However, real individuals occupying any
of the subject positions within such a narrative has a much wider repertoire of
alternative narratives to draw upon when making accounts of and sense of their
actual experience. Such
narratives that construct an
individuals own sense of subjectivity are not necessarily those of religious
fable. In the case of young
people, they are the stories of how to have fun which are told by young people
to each other. We analysed a
number of these narratives excluded from the Hellfire and Damnation story in Youth
in Trouble (Schostak 1991). Such excluded narratives are important
to any understanding of the processes and nature of everyday life which wants
to formulate the ways in which the quality of social experience for people can
be improved. As an example, one
young man Ernie, described the changes that had taken place in his life in
relation to gangs, arcade gambling and drinking:
As a teenager he became, he says, 'wilder,
I done some silly things just to show other people I'm a man'. When he was fifteen he began to
frequent an amusement arcade in the city centre. It was here that he got involved with what he now calls 'the
wrong crowd'. He used to play the
machines and meet individuals who would introduce themselves and start
friendships which he described as 'coupling off'. They would play the machines together. He describes it all now as a waste of
time 'because all it led me to was trouble'. However, at the time the involvement presented itself as
attractive: 'I thought it was
like, you know, 'yeah, it's a laugh.
Let's go along. Now you see
it as just a wild time'. It got
me
into a lot of trouble with the old firm that'.
(p.135)
As stories told to account for the self, each such narrative has a
privileged position in the construction of a publicly and privately
recognisable biography. Each such
biography has its dramatis personae that ties it to a community of
experience: the gang members of
the 'old firm', the friends, the enemies, and the institutions and agencies of
society at large. The biographic narrative is thus the mechanism through which
the imaginary community and its multiplicity of narratives about the world is
made flesh in the experience of the individual. The discourses through which the imaginary community
is constructed and tied to the biographical narrative provide the subject
positions for the young person who is being introduced to the structures of
pleasure and fantasy to be found in the arcades. Ernie's story complements that of Lee-Potter's de-centring
it from its position of morality to play to that of 'having fun'. Rather than the inner disciplining
voice it is the inner voice of seduction into a world of 'wild times'. It is world, however, which also has
its authorities, its alternative voices of discipline: for Ernie it was the Old Firm, a gang,
that he got into trouble with when he refused to pay back some money that he
had borrowed to use on the machines.
The two narratives of how to behave act like inverse images of each
other, complementary and necessary to each other. The pleasure to be experienced by the readers of each
-whether the pleasure of moral outrage, or the pleasure of the immoral thrill -
depend for their pleasure on the co-existence of each. The reader merely figures his or
herself into the subject position which provides the kind of pleasure desired.
It is by setting the different possible renderings of a story into
relationship with each other as 'possible tellings' that slowly the master
narratives of right and wrong, good and bad are relativised. As Lyotard has claimed, postmodernism
begins in a disbelief in master narratives. If the ordering power of the master narrative is undermined,
it is replaced by a multiplicity of possible narratives, each valid according
to their own logic. This sets in
train what I want to call the postmodern project of virtual youth.
The Postmodernist Project of Virtual Youth
Postmodernism as a project which does not escape modernism but rather
takes its forms to extreme has all the features already described but ends in
a
qualitative difference due to its characterising 'skepticism', in being as Lyotard defined it,
skeptical of all master narratives.
If modernist literature attempts to reveal the monstrosity of modern
life and the sciences eradicate it, leaving it as a residual to be dumped
elsewhere, post-modernism releases the monster into the play zone of
possibility. There is no longer a
modernist unconscious with its repressed contents under the supervision of the
censor. There is no 'elsewhere'
that the residues of modernist transformations can be deposited. All is on the surface, right here in
its obscenity, recycled as style,
the boundaries of inside-outside, conscious-unconscious,
subject-object, blurred. Perhaps the difference between
modernism and postmodernism is that the latter releases and recognises that
which the former imprisoned and enjoyed covertly or systematically refused to
see. As Scholes (1995 WWW) points
out:
modernism, especially around its Parisian
centre of activity, was ... a masculinist activity that positioned women
voyeuristically and turned would-be-agents into patients to an astonishing
extent. ... My argument, then, is that modermism was never a level playing
field but was a gendered movement, driven by the anxieties and ambivalences of
male artists and writers - anxieties and ambivalences that worked to bring the
figure of the prostitute to the centre of the modernist stage.
Postmodernism loosens the barrier between the forbidden and the
desired. It is no longer a product
of anxiety but of style. What
implications does this shift have for a definition of the role of youth in
postmodernism? A possible answer
is to be found in the definition of adolescence in the sense employed by
Kristeva (1990: 8) when she
writes:
I understand by the term 'adolescent' less an age category than an open
psychic
structure. Like the 'open systems'
of which biology speaks concerning living organisms that live only by
maintaining a renewable identity through interaction with another, the
adolescent structure opens itself to the repressed at the same time that it
initiates a psychic reorganisation of the individual - thanks to a tremendous
loosening of the superego.
Kristeva applies her concept to literature, in particular, seeing the
novel itself as a cultural product of the adolescent psychic structure, a structure
that is not located in the materiality of a biological phase of
development. If now a step further
on is taken and the super ego is not merely loosened but removed as a
centralised ordering and censoring force then we move to a concept of virtual
youth as it would apply in the cyberworlds that I described earlier. This would result in a complete
detachment of youth from any sense of biological materiality. Although those worlds are not yet fully
realised, they exist in outline and the concept of virtual youth is everywhere
present from replays of 1930s images of youth in contemporary product
advertising to the continual replaying of the 1960s beautiful generation in
popular culture. The Who in 'My
generation'
might have wished to die before they got old. Instead, they just got rich and their youth like Buddy
Holly's lives for ever in digital form.
Virtual youth implies a world of the artificial, constructed through the
interaction between electronic information flows and human minds. There is a kind of detachment from the
material world which modernist science and politics sought to master and its
replacement by a fully designed and designable world of objects that have only
a virtual reality. It is a shift
to worlds that are imaginary and symbolic and yet have a global and real
impact. Within this world of
cyberspace, the real is left dangling as embarrassing meat-based remnants at
the end of a computer terminal.
The materiality of the real is the residual in the realm of electronic
light. It is the drag that prevents full absorption into the infinite light of
the electronic world. It is a
world that does not age, a world of infinite virtual youth.
The political impact of the emergence of this world on the global stage
is only just being tackled. One
illustration can be found in Weinberger's (1995 WWW) analysis of Oliver Stone's
Natural Born Killers. He sees the
film as an 'unequivocally postmodern statement' on 'television violence and the
path of descent it paves':
Oliver Stone meticulously documents that
way in which television obscures the real meaning of violence. Consider the
scene in which Wayne Gale, the American Maniacs anchor, travels to prison
to (...) interview Mickey. This
scene mirrors the classic manner in which television breaks down the wall
between the acceptable social element (the audience) and the unacceptable
social element (the mass murder). It has been played out many times before:
one-on-one interviews which transport Charles Manson, Son-of-Sam, or John Wayne
Gacy right into our living-rooms. When Geraldo interviews Charles Manson we are
led to believe that Geraldo has taken his life into his own hands to enter a
prison and confront one-on-one the murderous beast. What the camera does not
reveal is the very controlled environment in which this interview occurs. It
does not reveal the probable fact the Manson faces the barrel of a gun during
the length of the interview. Nor the fact that Geraldo is surrounded by a horde
of
In the end, due to the highly-controlled
nature of the interview, we see a beast who seems somehow less beastly. Perhaps
his words are repugnant; but is he threatening? It would seem not. At least not
in such a way as to spoil the entertainment value, the thrill of seeing and
conquering this demon.
Manson as beast, the Minataur at the mythic centre of modernism, is here
repositioned for entertainment value in what I want to call the play zone of
possibility. There is a scene
outside the court room which shows young people being interviewed and one says
that although he believes in human rights if he was to be a mass murderer then
he would want to be like Micky and Mallory. This sets along side two realms, splitting subjectivity
between the human rights realm and the Micky and Mallory realm. The fantasy exists only in the tension
of the juxtaposition of the two creating a play zone of the possible in which
alternative life styles can be expressed.
This fantasy, of course, is not missed on the real media. Natural Born Killers became
particularly notorious when it was claimed to have caused copy cat
murders. Liam Kelly in the Daily
Mirror reported:
A CONTROVERSIAL new movie which police
believe has sparked off 10 grisly murders has been banned in the Republic.
The rare decision was taken by film censor Sheamus
Smith amid worldwide fury over the depiction of serial killings in the Oliver
stone movie Natural Born Killers.
No reason was given for the ban.
Britain has still to decide whether to award it a
certificate.
The film has been linked by police abroad to at least
10 deaths - six of
them in the United States where it opened two months
ago.
The most recent involved a 14-year-old boy
in Dallas who was
accused of decapitating a 13-year-old girl after
seeing the film.
He told friends he wanted to 'be famous like the
Natural Born Killers.' The British Board of Film and Video Classification is
said to be split over the film.
Said one member: 'It is a truly revolting movie. The
violence is all the way through so cutting it would be a pointless exercise.'
In Dublin, a spokesman for the distributors Warner
Brothers confirmed they intend to appeal.
The film was to be released here next month. Warner
had expected it to get an over 18 certificate.
It follows a young couple as they murder almost 100
people across the US.
Oliver Stone has defended the film as a satire on the
US media.
(Liam Kelly, Daily Mirror 27 Oct 94)
If this is not sufficient to indicate the extension of the fantasy, on
the internet can be found the 'Internet Crime Archives' (WWW 1995):
the digital home of the mass-murdering
serial killer.
A whoÕs who of the serial killer
scene. Look for your favourite
killer and check his or her standing on the Serial Killer Hit List. Savor their path of destruction.
Here there is the sense of a collapse of material based imaginaries into
the fantasy play world of virtual realities. In general I would say that people are increasingly
attracted to the images which confirm their experiences of a subjectivity not
just spit in a hierarchical modernist sense but splintered and splattered as a
fantasy structure without a centre across the virtual networks which construct
the possibilities for virtual lives.
This fantasy structure that has not natural centre of gravity acts like
the current of electricity to illuminate the myriad courses of action, and life
trajectories of a given narrative amongst an endless supply of digitally
reiterable narratives. Cyberspace
offers a virtual play zone of possibility but at the cost of material
engagement.
Recalling Carol's statement on life being pathetic. Perhaps we can understand now something
of the construction of its sense of fatalism. It has been accomplished through the mythic
overdetermination of narratives - everywhere she looks there is only the same
narrative which possess her and takes her straight to a life of being screwed
by boys, having babies and death.
She has been mastered by the master narratives of gender and social
class. Her material world offers
her no escape.
The postmodern curriculum offers escape from this material fatalism by
opening subjectivity up to a hypersubjectivity, the subjectivity of
hypertextual realities where death is of no consequence, merely the opportunity
to play the game again, or some other game.
Where modernism carried with it the unbearable weight of the unconscious
which spoke from Ôsomewhere elseÕ postmodernism perhaps has the unbearable
lightness of the absence of materiality where selves are distributed across a
network having only a virtual reality, a reality that can no longer digest the
real or experience the body as anything other than dumb meat hanging at the end
of a computer terminal.
Conclusions for an Education of Virtual and Material Realities
What are the implications for education? I do not believe that the strategy here is to build a
postmodern education but rather to construct an educational approach that can
critically explore all the possible perspectives whether traditional, modernist
or postmodernist in terms of their impact on being human and on being young in
particular.
I earlier described education as 'an invitation to explore the possible
in relation to their possibilities for realisation'. Such a description encompasses both the virtual and the
material as a transformational project.
Education is always about the processes of transformation on the one
hand and the structures of realisation whether material or virtual on the
other. By implication it is also
about the processes and structures which seek to restrain and restrict the
possibilities for transformation and realisation. As such education is an essential moment of and provides an
important perspective on all cultural action and production.
The implications of adopting an educational approach for young people
are that they can begin to explore the real structures of their lives which
virtually and materially position them into subject positions not of their
choosing. These positions
construct for them a fate which splits them from their needs and interests and
strings them out across material and virtual networks of fantasy as both the
objects of enjoyment, and the means to sustain the enjoyment of those in
positions of privilege and power.
Carol, who thought life was pathetic, may be regarded
by an uncaring market economy as a residue, waste material, a drag on the
welfare system. Schooling can be
seen from this point to view to have failed to process her, or cynically to
have succeeded in removing her from a system reserved for the middleclasses in
the service of elites. Education
as an opportunity in school hardly existed for her, if at all. If there is to be an educational
project appropriate to the modern world and the needs of all individuals, the
descriptions of the monstrosity of the modern, although necessary, do not
suffice. Radical eductionists do
of course exist but have little real influence on the directions and processes
of day to day teaching in schools.
But the field of education is not just restricted to
what happens in schools, it is everywhere: the arts, the sciences, the media, the markets and all the
public and private institutions that compose society at all its levels from
local to global. The field is open
and so are the strategies for educational engagement with each other. No activity of everyday life need be
excluded from an educational focus on the processes and possibilities for transformation. All narratives of fatalism can be
opened up in such engagements to reveal their structures and their
alternatives.
References
Traditional References
Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined
Communities. Reflections on the
Origin and Spread if Nationalism,
London and New York, Verso
Benedikt, M. (1991) Cyberspace: first Steps, Cambride,
Massachusetts; London, England
Forman, H. J. (1933) Our Movie Made Children, New
York, Macmillan.
Hamilton, D. (1980) 'Adam
Smith and the moral economy of the classroom', mimeo, Department of Education,
University of Glasgow
Kristeva, J. (1990) 'The
Adolescent Novel', in:Fletcher, J., and Benjamin, A. (eds) Abjection,
Melancholia and Love: the work of Julia Kristeva, London and New York,
Routledge
le Corbusier (1929) The
City of To-Morrow and its Planning, London, John Rodker
Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, forward by Frederic
Jameson, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 10, Manchester,
Manchester University Press
Schostak, J. F. (1983) Maladjusted Schooling: Deviance, Social
Control and Individuality in Secondary Schooling, London, Philadelphia:
Falmer
Schostak, J. F. (ed.) (1988) Breaking into the Curriculum: the Impact
of Information Technology on Schooling, London,
New York. Methuen.
Schostak,
J. F. (1989) 'The Play of Education', Cambridge
Journal of Education, vol. 19.
No. 2. 207-223.
Schostak, J. F. (1993) Dirty Marks. The Education of Self, Media and
Popular Culture, London, Boulder: Pluto
Schostak,
J. F., and Logan, T. (eds) (1984) Pupil Experience, London, Sydney. Croom Helm.
Skinner, B. F. (1976) Walden II, New York, Macmillan; London,
Collier Macmillan
Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour, Farnborough, Saxon House.
Zizek, S. (1991) Looking
Awry. An introduction to Jacques
Lacan through popular culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London,
England: MIT
WWW References
Internet Crime Archives (1995)
http://underground.net/Art/Crime/archives.html
Kroker, A., Kroker, M., and
Cook, D. (1989) Panic Encyclopedia:
The definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene,
http://www.freedonia.com/panic/
Scholes, R. (1995) 'In the
Brothel of Modernism: Picasso and
Joyce', http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/mcm-home.html
Weinberger, M. (1995) 'Natural
Born Killers. A postmodern
analysis of violence and television',
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/Ómbweinbe/contents.html