Abstract
When will cultural studies get over youth culture? When will we be post-youth? Youth has been the proxy for cultural studies resistance, politics and social change through much of its history. When Richard Hoggart trashed his Juke box boys, when Paul Willis followed his ‘lads’, when Dick Hebdige discursively combed the mohawks, we were drawn – like a moth to a flame or a sociologist to a biker – to the weird clothes, interesting hair and complex bricolage. Our mistake was that we made youth carry the burden of disruptive politics. Cultural studies researchers relied on youth to be our ventriloquist’s dummy, to speak anti-establishment politics and activate Gramsci’s war of position.
After 11 September, wars on terror, the Global Financial Crisis and the Trump turmoil, cultural studies researchers are still using youth to speak for us. What we require is a complex and intricate theorization of the political economy beyond cosmopolitan sociology and a benevolent Blairite Britpop third way. What we require is a deep diagnostic to clean the weeping gouge sliced open by late capitalism, anti-statism and neo-liberalism. Instead, we receive another offering from (another) US-based University Press, applauding edgy youth.
Instead of summoning safety pins and mohawks, this current crop of cultural studies proxies are activating Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and mobile phones. The Internet, web, read write web and social web enabled verby nouns: efficiency, productivity and connectivity. But verby nouns are not the enablers of political and social change.
Since Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins has enlarged his participatory cultural portfolio to bear-hug social media. His theoretical technique of reinscribing already existing signs and codes with new meanings is not easily migrated from analogue to digital realms because of the changes to conceptualizations, speed and deterritorialization. The transformations to capitalism and commodification mean that creating stable spaces to build even micro communities committed to social change is difficult.
Sharing is not political. Commenting is not participating. What is invariably left out of Jenkins’ books published in the last 10 years is the banality of social media. The minutia of our lives – the microtraumas of a digital papercut – agitate our understandings of importance, relevance and expertise. What I have described as ‘the google effect’ – the flattening of information quality and interpretation – has now permeated all sectors and boundaries in our lives. New shoes are granted equivalent weight to a comment on gun crime. Indeed, a photograph of the new shoes may encourage more likes and the comment on gun crime a few de-friendings.
There is nothing in the Internet or web that is participatory, liberationist or resistive. There is nothing in young people – or youth – that is participatory, liberationist or resistive. Combining them into a radical bundle of ‘cultural theory’ does not make them any more like the red brigades. That remains the key problem of this new book by New York University Press, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. What theoretical suite is being summoned? There is no exploration of Virilian speed, Baudrillian hooked or unhooked signifiers, or Beckian zombie concepts. Henry Giroux is unmentioned, with Sherry Turkle an unsatisfactory replacement. The medium is not only the message but the trope, theory, argument and outcome. A platform is not politics. An interface is not ideology.
By any media necessary is written by a research team, with Henry Jenkins the most famous member. Seven chapters, each written by the writers in combination, offer basic theorizations of ‘young people’ and ‘the media’. The group of five authors is part of the Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network. Such a network suggests an international inflection. Yet once more, this book is US-centric. Even the non-American case studies are inflected and infused by a US frame. Not surprisingly, there is a lack of theorization of the state. It is as if the Birmingham Centre never closed, with the ghosts of Resistance through Rituals resurrected – without the Althusserian or Gramscian inflection – to be ‘emblematic of the crisis in democracy’ (p. 8). The rituals are described as ‘expressive practices’ (p. 7). The rituals are described as ‘clicktivism’. The subtitle of the book proclaims ‘the new youth activism’. There is nothing new in the youth or activism that is configured in these pages.
Henry Jenkins commences the book, ‘introducing the core concepts’, by summoning zombies at an Occupy event in Washington Square during the Fall of 2011. The Occupy moment was described by Jenkins as ‘primarily discursive’. What does that phrase mean? Glib and vague, the profound error of US-based cultural studies was to assume that Foucault was radical. Actually, his anti-statism created the theoretical vacuum for neoliberalism. Whenever we summon the echo of Foucault and discourse, we once more displace a discussion of post-state, post-public politics.
While Jenkins argues that ‘young people have refreshed and renewed the public’s symbolic power as they fight for social justice’ (p. 2), no evidence or argument is offered for this statement. He continues, ‘grassroots media are being deployed as the tool by which to challenge the failed mechanism of institutional politics’. Making a statement does not make it true, real, authentic or important. The medium is not the message. McLuhan was wrong. We need to be re-reading his great mentor Harold Innis in order to understand the bias of communication systems. Space-dominating media – like the newspaper, radio and Internet-enabled platforms and interfaces – appear important, big and powerful. Yet they are shallow, superficial, transitory and ephemeral. It is the time-dominating media – as are carried through indigenous narratives – that maintain the power, the potency and longevity. Colonizers continue making the same mistake. Dominating a space does not determine ownership, credibility or importance.
Harold Innis configured these arguments just before his death. Yet his student, Marshall McLuhan, gained shiny 1960s popularity for a Reader’s Digest rendering of these ideas. Innis wallowed in near obscurity, perhaps caused by his dense prose. McLuhan appeared in a Woody Allen film. Henry Jenkins is a 1990s version of McLuhan.
The key question to ask Jenkins and his colleagues is how they know that institutional politics has ‘failed’? The second – meta – question is more profound. Why are supposedly left-leaning academics feeding the neoliberal ideology that ‘the system’ is broken? If Twitter is the answer to activism, then Pokémon Go is the answer to the obesity epidemic. Furthermore, how can any theorization of power and institutions be offered without grasping the Global Financial Crisis or activating theorists of claustropolitan sociology? Twitter has not – and will not – stop African American men being murdered by police officers. Black lives matter – with or without the hashtag. But such knowledge is based on a deep, complex and intricate theorization of colonization, slavery and worker exploitation. Intellectual shortcuts do not create solutions.
While Jenkins (thankfully) critiques Marc Prenky’s digital natives, there is little offered in this book that generates a deeper sociology of digitization. Instead, Jenkins confirms that ‘the circulation of media content through social media can significantly amplify the voices of politically active youth’ (p. 18). He then presents evidence for his argument through yarn bombing.
The problem is that the old sociological categories – race, gender, class, sexuality and age – no longer offer a litany of hope, expectation and empowerment. When digitization is added to the diocese of identity, then certainties crumble. Jenkins recognizes that ‘skills and experiences are unevenly distributed among American youth’ (p. 45). The question not raised from this realization is if the skills and experiences are unevenly distributed, then what is linking ‘youth’ as a political group? At what point is the category of youth stretched to such a scale that it snaps?
This book could have been important if it had engaged with the history of cultural studies and then offered a trajectory for its transgression. This imperative to understand the movement from consciousness to activism, self to community, has been the focus of the best of cultural studies scholars, from Stuart Hall to Jonathan Dollimore. Yet Jenkins uses Robert Putnam and Peter Dahlgren.
And what of popular culture, let alone popular cultural studies? Fan studies is a mess, a shambolic collection of blokes talking about why female fans write fan fiction (still) and make composite videos, uploaded on YouTube. In this collection, Sangita Shresthova quotes John Hartley as a theorist of activism and entertainment. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik stated that ‘fans have historically organized to protect their collective interests as fans’ (p. 113). She argued that Harry Potter fans use the ‘fictional world to help young people make sense of real-world issues’ (p. 132). This is all very simple: basic theories of socialization, basic theorization of representation, and no engagement with the political economy, globalization, modernity or mobility studies. Most of the arguments in this book could have been written in 1992 with few changes. Adding digitization to the cultural studies coffee pot does not make stale, cold espresso into a bubbling, boiling soy latte.
The unsettling component of this book is the easy acceptance of what Liana Gamber-Thompson describes as ‘young libertarians’ (p. 237) who are ‘reimagining’ political life. Such untheorized connections then create the space for Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova to confirm that ‘popular culture offers shared references and resources participants use to help frame their messages and provides platforms through which they can stage their hopes and fears about the world and thus start to exercise the civic imagination’ (p. 258). No references to Goffman, Innis or Michaels structure this case. The medium is the message.
Has cultural studies now lulled back into a satiated, compliant, commodified sleep, revelling in what Jenkins and Shresthova described as ‘expressive politics’ (p. 268)? Is there nothing else? Popular culture and digitization matter, not because they are expressive or representative. They matter because they are political, dangerous, edgy, nasty, confusing, ambivalent and difficult. This book has not recognized, understood or tracked the changes to popular culture and the changes to popular cultural studies in the last 10 years. Cleaving into high pop and low pop, thinking pop and banal pop, and claustropolitan pop and cosmopolitan pop, True Detective, Breaking Bad, Happy Valley, Orange is the New Black, Wayward Pines and Top of the Lake – to name the tip of this brutalizing and gritty cultural transformation – show that pop is political. Such programmes do not make youth into proxies for change or radicalism or resistance, but understand how the tragedies of daily life crush the capacity for consciousness.