The Necessity of Representing 'Youth': Problems, Politics, Ethics, Demands, Suggestions

1. On the Necessity of Representing ‘Youth’ (whatever that means): Problems, Politics, Ethics, Demands, Suggestions Steven Threadgold University of Newcastle TASA Youth Symposium: The Ethics of Engagement, Participation and Representation. University of Melbourne. February 21, 2019.

2. 1. The Usual Sociological Problems with Representing Anything • 2. Politics: how does one represent ‘the slow cancellation of the future’? • 3. Ethics: balancing care for youth with actually existing perilous realities • 4. Demanding a future: What is youth studies for? • 5. Suggestions (or, what representation do I perform): A focus on practices and strategies and using figures to interrogate struggles

3. Some preliminary defensiveness… Which youth studies? Western, mostly white, mostly urban etc My own subject position: despite being a very well paid academic, I still feel like a working class person in a middle class world. GenX cynicism I’m going to talk about ‘representation’ in lots of ways!

4. 1. Problems 1. The Usual Sociological Problems with Representing Anything • Using words always simplifies, distorts or misrepresents • The problem of irony and post truth • Agency/structure must die! • Cultural dupes, homo economicusand risky subjects must die! • ‘Figures’ in youth studies and beyond

5. Using words always simplifies, distorts or misrepresents We all know that the author is well and truly dead… If Foucault and Barthes didn’t assassinate the author, our contemporary mediascape has buried them. Our post-truth era makes representing anything fraught. As Hage points out, politics is ontological, a battle over ‘reality’ . The very object of youth studies, ‘youth’, has multiple meanings. When it comes to youth research, we need to be more cognisant of this, stake out our object more clearly. This is even more important if we want to challenge the dominate misconceptions of youth. For me, this needs to be the key task of youth studies.

6. the representational problem of irony and post truth Is reality beyond satire? Or, the same old, same old? Below has been used to show the apparent narcissism of the young, they are actually looking up info on the art. Dominant media seems to invert parody as a weapon. • When satire is built into our reality, this is a problem of representation and irony. • Baudrillard seems increasingly prescient these days.

7. Agency/structure must die! An example of the problem of representation can be illustrated in the constant renewal of agency/structure debates. This seems to happen because of the perennial sociological problem of multiple objects: individuals in the social. This is a problem of representation: no matter how thorough or complex our theories, they can only ever partially represent. New theories attempt to move beyond this dichotomy: new materialism, STS, pragmatic sociology, affect etc. Critics point out that these perspectives risk reproducing dominant ideologies, focus too much on change/chaos/flux/ emergence/instability etc., and struggle to account for power. This echoes the Marxist/Post-structuralist debates or First, Second, Third, Fourth Wave Feminism of previous generations. Around we go again…

8. Cultural dupes, homo economicus and risky subjects must also die! These figures dominate the representation of youth in media, politics and public perception.

9. Figures in youth studies and beyond • the political: Figures of moral panic and Figures of revolution • in capitalism: Figures of cultural dupes, homo economicusand risky subjects and sexy, cool, edgy Figures of co-optation and immaterial labour • the temporal: Figures of the immanent future and Figures of romanticised nostalgia • in youth studies: Cognitive Figures of ‘risk-taking’ youth and Social Figures of ‘At Risk’ Youth • Asking how we ‘figure’ youth also implies the question of how we figure youth studies. • The sort of questions we want to ask young people, the type of analysis we want to perform, and our political orientation will lead us to depict, that is, figure, young people in specific ways. • Youth studies in this sense needs various figures of youth. • But we need to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the figure we use. • If one’s work is about subcultural identities and the way they may create forms of everyday resistance, one risks overemphasising versions of ‘youth’ that accentuate creativity, agency, and style. • If one’s work is about how class engenders educational inequalities, there are risks that the figure of the young person created in that work renders them a passive prisoner of their position in social space. • This is representation

10. 2. Politics 2.Hauntological politics: how does one represent ‘the slow cancellation of the future’? Youth studies has always had an inherent interest in the future. Furlong and Cartmel’s epistemological fallacy has been useful for considering the affective atmosphere of the 1990s-2000s This aligned with reflexive modernity/risk society theories that still have vitality, but social changes, especially the rise of digital culture and a media life, see new spaces open where young people practice, interact, make decisions, etc. Move from the ‘epistemological fallacy’, which has ‘false consciousness’ overtones, to considering our hauntological moment as an affective space where everyday struggles and strategies happen.

11. Hauntology and the slow cancellation of the future For Derrida, the neologism/puncept ‘hauntology’ means capitalism’s everyday ontology post-1991 is haunted by communism, the ‘spectre of Marx’. McKenzie Wark has asked ‘what if we have moved beyond capitalism into something worse’? We can see this in critical theory: Cognitive Capitalism (Boutang); Gore Capitalsm (Valencia); Carceral Capitalism (Wang); Cool Capitalism (McGuigan); Platform Capitalism (Srnicek); Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff); Disaster Capitalism (Klein); Vampire Capitalism (Kennedy). For Mark Fisher, in the era of ‘capitalist realism’, where it seems more possible to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than the end of capitalism, much pop culture has been accused of being obsessed with the past (retromania), of lacking creativity. Hauntology is a longing for a promised future that never came. But for Fisher, this hauntological culture is an expression of the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ (Beradi), where the look towards the past is strategy, a melancholic expression of coping with the denial of a future. He uses examples like UK musician Burial, who digitally inserts crackly ‘analogue’ sounds into his music.

12. Hauntology Beyond the ‘legislated nostalgia’ of GenX and the nihilist ‘no future’ anthems of 70s punk, the past is now mined in hauntological culture to express a melancholic relation to the absence of a future, any future. Jameson’s ‘nostalgic mode’ of retrospection and pastiche is doxic and self-fulfilling. Fisher: “The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations… The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed”. Fisher calls this ‘reflexive impotence’. For instance, neoliberal capitalism has slowly but systematically divested artists of the resources needed to create ‘the new’, where welfare, arts funding and the like have been decimated leaving the relatively privileged as dominating creative spaces. A process of diminishing expectations and acceptance?

13. The Hauntological Hipster Fisher: “Artists that came to be labelled hauntological were suffused with an overwhelming melancholy; and they were preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised memory – hence a fascination with television, vinyl records, audiotape, and with the sounds of these technologies breaking down”. The much maligned figure of the hipster is emblematic of processes of hauntology and capitalist realism: denied the economic opportunities of previous generations, looking backwards becomes a way of dealing with the anxieties of the future where climate change, labour market precarity, the return of the threat of nuclear war, and a raft of other uncertainties ‘haunt’ the present. If the future is cancelled and one can’t imagine anything else other the capitalism, then irony, nostalgia and melancholy are symptoms of the struggle to maintain ontological security. For Fisher, the huge rise in mental health issues over the past few decades is an emblem of capitalist alienation.

14. Hauntological popular culture • While in previous work I have used the figure of the hipster (and bogan) as a proxy for class anxieties and disgust, it may also illustrate and understand aspects of the hauntology in popular and consumer youth culture: • the lumberjack beards and woodwork • records and tapes • knitting • home brewing, craft, pickling everything, etc. • ruin porn • ironic embracing of onesies and Eurovision etc • ‘adulting’ • While commercial TV is dominated by Reality TV and sport, maybe what we could loosely categorise as ideological TV, what I would loosely categorise as hauntological examples are everywhere. • melancholic nostalgia: Stranger Things, Pen15, Mad Men • melancholic dystopias: Maniac, Westworld, The Walking Dead, Black Mirror, The Handmaid’s Tale, The 100, The Leftovers • depressive hedonism dramadies: Girls, Russian Dolls, BoJack Horseman, Broad City, Flaked, Love, Fleabag

15. The future is always affectively present Bourdieu has argued that there is a protensive relationship between habitus and field, where practice does not happen in time, but actually makes time: so practice is a form of temporalisation (see Adkins). ‘Reflexive impotence’, ‘melancholic hope’, ‘cynically hopeful’, ‘revolutionary pessimism’. Immaterial labour increasingly dominates our subjectivity. Young people are invoked as an affective proxy for ‘the future’, a figure of hope. In the constant panics over and about young people, there is a moral imperative that if young people are ‘good’ the future will be ‘good’. While the future is unpredictable, even intangible, it is also affective. Young people as a figure of the future are a surrogate for anxiety about the future, especially as the present is so precarious and insecure. So, while the future is something that is immanent, it is also ever-present as a reflexive leitmotif. See Julia Cook and Hernan Cuervo forthcoming in The Sociological Review on hope.

16. 3. Ethics: balancing care for youth with actually existing perilous realities Can we do representational work that is honest about the present and the future, that is not nihilist or even ‘realistic’, but hopeful? Should we even try? Governance has moved from neo-liberal to ‘nihiliberal’? Climate change; precarity; Brexit; treatment of refugees; hyper-oligarchical and anti-rational political class; an ever-rightward Overton window with the rise of fascism, white supremacy and alt-right; enduring violence against women, we could go on here… Illusio and hope: conceptualising illusio around the notion of hope as an affective space, illusio is something that has futurity embedded in its very definition, something to be worked towards, a goal. So it can be used to think about the play off between hopeful futures and hauntological futures

17. Generationalism matters in this space • Much of the problems seem to happen within the so-called left, where older establishment figurers refuse to get out of the way, think they are entitled to lead, are completely divorced from the everyday reality of the working class and the young, and cynically use identity politics for there own ends. • Anything actually radical is seen as ‘immature’. • Aaron Sorkin telling the likes of AOC to ‘grow up’… • This is a man who created the liberal wet dream called The West Wing. • Hope? • ‘every billionaire is a policy failure’ • Green New Deal • 70% of Fox viewers agree with the 70% tax rate over $10million • Germany is phasing out Coal, has already started with nuclear. https://twitter.com/i/status/1092807628147879939

18. 4. Demanding a future: What is youth studies for? • Should youth studies intervene more publicly? • Is this even possible in contemporary academia? • Should we make more of an effort to publicly critique the dominant psychological model of youth? • Or the bullshit entrepreneurial, mobile, creative, innovative youth promoted by the likes of FYA? • Should we try to promote the Qualitative over the Quantitative to challenge the dominant fetishization of statistics as representative of anything? • Should youth studies be ‘prefigurative’?

19. 5. Suggestions I have proposed that youth can be conceived as figures of struggle (Threadgold 2018), reflexively positioned between the doxic governmental promises – study hard, work hard, the meritocracy will see you prevail – and the everyday reality of precarious labour markets, political upheaval lead by conservative and reactionary forces, and global risks such as climate change. Young people are often reflexively realistic about their future. This is but one figure and youth studies requires a wide array to cover the complexity of young people’s lives. But, importantly, youth studies needs to start to consider how some of the figures used within it contribute to, buffer and even reinforce the problematic figures that dominate political and media discourse. In an academic field where so-called impact is being emphasised, this is one area where youth studies can publicly intervene to make impacts beyond our own academic interests.