When we come to the post-adolescent “youth” cultures that define our own postmodern culture of global capitalism with its liberalization of trade, and its characterization as a goods and service economy—a consumer society, the record on child labor laws has become equally suspect as those “othered”
“have-not” countries where familial poverty drives children to work.
McDonalds’ restaurant, Woolworths, Tesco, Safeway, Burger King, Odeon Cinemas, Heritage Hotels, Fourbuoys, and Thorpe Park amusement park have all been successfully prosecuted in England for violating child labor laws. A McDonalds’ franchise holder in Camberley, England was charged a record £12,400 penalty following an investigation that found school pupils working up to 16 hours a day in what was described as a “fast-food sweat-shop.” On school days, 15- and 16-year-olds were beginning shifts straight after class and then working through sometimes until 0200 hours the fol-lowing morning. On Saturdays, a 15-year-old girl was starting work before 0800 and working through until 0120 the next day. The McSpotlight Web site has archival transcripts of libel trails of its past abuses and a debating room where workers can exchange horror stories about working under its protective Golden Arches. In the state of Maine, Wal-Mart retailing giant was
found guilty in 1,463 cases for using child labor, incurring $205, 605 worth of fines. Wal-Mart also has factory sweat shops in Honduras where young women aged 14–17 labor 9 hours a day, often putting in three hours of forced overtime, ironing shirts and sewing clothing for the market. News stories such as these are not exceptional. The Internet is full of them should one take the time to search since they receive little attention in daily news-papers. More and more youth are working part-time at so-called McJobs to support themselves as postsecondary education becomes a necessity to even-tually find employment, be it only on a semipermanent or contract basis, accommodating to the logic of post-Fordist capitalism (Harvey 1989).
When it comes to the question of youth, globalized capital seems to be blurring any smug romantic claim by the West of still having a protected time of “childhood.” The pressure of educational institutions (secondary and postsecondary alike) to become more “pragmatic” and accountable to indus-try’s needs is no longer in dispute. Universities have turned more and more to chasing external research dollars, fund raising, tuition hiking, and in some cases, the doing away with tenure track positions. Corporate universities that apply an updated curriculum to the new media (computer and information technologies) make no pretense that the “education” they offer is for any-thing other than the job market. Then there are “universities” which multi-national companies have established specifically to train their own employees.
No pretence to lofty ideals here either. McDonalds, Microsoft, Sony . . . all have such institutions with specific marketing curriculums.
The “loss” of childhood is further marked by the disappearance of identi-fiable sartorial distinctions between adults and youth. Even gothic and skater clothes have an adult appeal. Does wearing such clothes mean that a 50-year-old “Goth” is resisting the social order in the same way a gothic teen is? The answer remains ambiguous. Such a phenomenon offers new challenges for understanding identity formations. The same applies to leisure pursuits such as computer games, eating habits (fast food), and tastes in films, which seems to have become, by and large, intergenerational as well. Although a rating system exists for video games and movies, censorship enforcement is practi-cally nonexistent. The “old” 1954 Comic Code Authority (CCA) of self-regulated conduct prohibited the drawing of exaggerated physical qualities of women (mainly breasts), as well as scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary gunplay, physical agony, gory and gruesome crimes, rape and seduction. Scenes dealing with the walking dead, vampires, and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolves were also prohibited. The expectation was always having Good triumph over Evil. All this has been done away with. Marvel has now its own rating system, which reflects the classifications approved by most movie rating boards: All Ages, Marvel PG, Marvel PG Plus, Parental Advisory/Explicit Content.
The lowering of the age of consent for drinking, driving, sex (in some states), and the false perception of the rise in youth crimes has led to more and more trails taking place in adult court. There has been legislative pres-sure to have the Young Offenders Act amended in both the United States
and Canada, children are allowed to legislate against their parents, and now there is a newly established journal, Youth Justice (2002) to address these concerns. These indicate behaviors privileged only to responsible and mature citizens. The population of youth who are considered “at risk” is growing, teenage pregnancy is claimed to be on the increase, sexual activity begins at an earlier age, and increased drug abuse are further indicators of the dramatic changes that have taken place. These are symptoms of a “moral panic” that we address more fully in the second part of our book. They present several indicators of the way “normal” developmental transitions as established by the economic trajectory of capitalism identified by such terms as child, teenager, adolescence, postadolescence, and adult have been twisted into new configurations in both directions. The paradox is that children are given more “mature privileges” and responsibilities while teenagers and the 20-something cohort are not able to take on adult responsibilities for economic reasons, while adults desire to be young. From this perspective development is not somehow “progressive,” rather from a psychoanalytic view, birth, growth, and death cycles take on different meanings, shaped as they are by the hypercomplex play between designer capitalism and the web of competing desires.
The issue of the “rights of children” (both pro and con), the rise of
“adult” comic books, the falling age of models in the advertisement indus-try, more nudity and exposed skin in every facet of public entertainment, and the growing openness to gay, lesbian, and transgendered representation are yet further indications of intergenerational confusion and moral panic.
Sexuality, once the preserve of adults, can no longer be contained. The threat of AIDS has changed all that. Church authorities have been hard at work promoting abstinence as the sole solution to this anxiety. Any sense of
“shame,” as a residual holdover from the Puritanism of the Protestant ethic, is waning. Such a reading would constitute yet another aspect of the “return of the repressed.” Capitalist ideology, as hypothesized by Max Weber and well documented by Beder (2000), was based on an asceticism of hard work and rational conduct, which manifests itself in the development of a strong moral character, who is then able to work for the greater glory of God that much better. In contemporary society, porn Internet sites are by far the most popular of all what is available on the www. (In the United States, the only time that the volume of porn Internet users actually dropped was during the 9/11 terrorist attack!) As for the work ethic, the tendency has been to blur the distinction between work and leisure and make leisure as profitable as possible.
When it comes to youth, the major shift from printing technologies to digitalized media technologies has caused the greatest concernment of all.
Typographic print cultures that eventually replaced the Medieval chiro-graphic (script) cultures introduced a form of literacy that eventually stan-dardized spelling (Webster) and grammar, and produced a self-reflective individuality (Montaigne, Rembrandt) based on reason and scientific empiri-cism, and thereby essentially establishing a division between adult and children
based on ability to read and write. One could be 40-years-old and still be a
“child” in this sense. Since the invention of the printing press it took approx-imately a hundred-and-fifty years to shift from a mixed oral/script culture to one where knowledge could be “objectified” in the form that was con-tained in a book and represented by a discipline (as developed by the French Encyclopedists). Electric cultures at the turn of the twentieth century (cin-ema, electricity, telephone, and telegraph) have been supplemented and sup-planted by our own electronic telematic informational culture based on digitalization, computerization, and communication at a distance. In our electronic age the objectively constructed visual illusion of typographical cul-tures remain both preserved and written-over (palimpsest) through digital photography, television, video, cinema, and holography, much like oral and script cultures were both preserved and over-written by typographic cultures, never totally disappearing. These developments should not be interpreted as yet another form of “technological determinism” that is shaping reality, rather it is the fantasy formations that accompany the new electronic culture, which is of particular interest for our study, which we deal expensively in part III of our study on cyberspace. Designer capitalism based on the electronic rev-olution has also blurred the developmental distinctions between adults and youth in the way the knowledge barrier has been inverted as information.
Adults are now in competition with young people in the electronic indus-tries. The rhetoric of creativity, flexibility, computer savvy is placed on youthful energy. It is the adults who have to catch up.
Given this decentering, should it be any wonder why the fantasmatic child is once more being courted to restore faith in the authority of the con-sumerist capitalist system? Such fantasmatic recuperation is especially evident in Strauss and Howe’s thesis as developed in Millennials Rising. The Net Generation is being courted as the next upcoming “heroic” generation of the “fourth turning,” capable of solving the next “secular crisis” that the United States will find itself in post-9/11 climate. Strauss and Howe’s
“journey into the future” means that there is a selective extrapolation of what can be traced in the present to provide future possibilities. The “future” in its kernel is already here, so to speak. The Net Generation is said to place a high value on science and technology compared to the Boomers and Xers because they have grown up in the computer age with all its advances. They will provide technological and biotech solutions for the twenty-first century and place America on top in both scientific research and practical application, after the “scare” it experienced from Japan in the 1980s and early 1990s, and now from the growing markets of The European Union. There are few
“slackers” amongst them, unlike Gen-X. This “echo” generation is said to be more obedient of authority, more mature, and especially smart. “Smart”
refers to their more “pragmatic” approach to life. Because of the Internet they now have access to information; anyone with a search engine can become an
“instant” expert, artist, or shopper. The result is that this Net Gen has become even more “autonomous” in their decision making than ever before.
The most valued traits are said to be individuality and uniqueness. Crafting
a personalized image that communicates individuality, even as it paradoxi-cally confirms membership in a group or groups, is what it’s all about.
In chapters 2 and 3 we introduce our hypothesis concerning postmodern youth culture and the fantasies that structure it. We shall not follow Strauss and Howe’s trajectory, although our examples throughout the study are, by and large, confined to the 1990s decade, the more recent developments in music in our companion books, the Internet, video games, and television.
We attempt to provide an understanding as to why Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a unique way to grasp youth fantasies, and hopefully provide enough examples to grasp its conceptualizations.