76 argue that human beings have both a conscious and unconscious tendency to avoid
internal dissonance. Whether this is a natural or learned human cognitive predispostion, it follows that individuals who have throughout their lives been
overexposed to neoliberal ideas or any other will seek to consciously and unconsciously avoid alternative or conflicting ideas and rationalize their existing
beliefs, which in effect, contributes to social continuity. This thesis starts from the position that research on neoliberal social
reproduction must take into account and investigate where and how non-elite Western inhabitants constitute, practice, rationalize, and reproduce democracy and
democratic institutions of whatever variety, and how dominant social institutions, and mass media in particular, help to shape and inform those specific individual
and shared cognitive frameworks and their underlying ontological presuppositions of human nature. As Jost 1995, pp. 413-414 argues:
Of course, the question of whether some or most people do indeed possess highly sophisticated and integrated systems of political beliefs
is a valid and useful empirical question […] but it is important also to recognize the opposite, namely the degree to which errors in social
cognition serve as an impediment to
accurate and
useful representation of the political world.
2.6 Towards Yet Another Third-Way: A Reformulated BothAnd Framework
Thus far, I have reviewed and critiqued the last seventy years of some of the more prominent social reproduction theories as they apply to Western capitalist
societies, with specific references to the UK and the US. In sum, these comprised: 1 the political-economy approach, as employed by the classic Frankfurt School,
and others, which argues that societal structures disseminate a market-centred hegemonic ideology that significantly shapes and frames the socio-cultural
individualism. However, false consciousness alone does not account for the strong reactive and emotive dissonant cognitive processes that can pressure people to convince themselves of their
existing beliefs. Hence, in order to better explain how individuals hold and reproduce discourses and practices that r
un counter to their interests and that contribute to theirs and their group’s disadvantaged social position, both external socio-structural ideological mechanisms and internal
cognitive processes must be looked at together Elster, 1982; Jost, 1995. In other words, cognitive dissonance is a phenomenon that, in addition to the other cognitive factors identified above, can
contribute to neoliberal false consciousness and unconsciousness, but as I will discuss in Chapter 8, can also contribute to contesting it.
77 experiences and socio-cognitive development of individuals living in capitalist
societies; 2 the culturalist approach as employed by the Birmingham School, which argues that individuals are active agents in the interpretation and use of
media-culture; and 3 the bothand approach, employed by Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu that calls for a rejection of the structureagency dichotomy, and
that pays attention to the role that socio-cognitive dispositions play in reproducing society. All of them have useful ideas that can be synthesized and coupled with
insights from cognitive and social psychology and political philosophy to create the kind of more holistic bothand synthesis needed to theorize, study, and
research the multi-faceted, insidious, and surreptitious effects that neoliberalism
levies on contemporary young people.
Therefore, in order to move beyond the proverbial cul de sac in social reproduction theory and towards a reconciliation of the key insights from all of the
ideas described in this chapter, it is sufficient to argue the following: dominant social structures and institutions work to interpellate individuals through a
hegemonic and discursive set of norms and values which, if internalized, can form into a durable habitus comprised of cognitive schemata and corresponding
dispositions that can predispose agents to beliefs, attitudes, emotions, orientations and practices that reproduce those same dominant social structures. A key task for
social science is to empirically investigate how, if at all, this hegemonic and discursive set of norms and values has been cognitively interpreted, framed,
negotiated, rejected, rationalized, andor contested by individuals living in neoliberal societies. In the current UK and US context, this implies that dominant
social structures work to interpellate individual agents through a neoliberal habitus, and therefore, this investigation requires that research on neoliberal social
reproduction takes the guidelines below into consideration. These guidelines do not constitute a theory per say, but rather offer an orienting conceptual framework
from which to critique, situate, and synthesize existing theories and develop new ones:
The examination of everyday contexts, social positioning, and cultural practices of individuals must be balanced with equal attention to and
exploration of how existing power structures create and disseminate self-
78 serving ideological obfuscations meant to distract, manipulate, and
interpellate social subjects through neoliberal discourses and practices.
It is important to analyze and document how far and in what ways the public sphere is being contaminated and inflected by neoliberal interests
and discourses, and to investigate how corporate mass media and other dominant social institutions might influence the political-philosophical
cognitive frameworks and corresponding practices of audiences.
It is important to couple any critique of neoliberal culture and political economy with an analysis of oppositional cultures - in part by
investigating and documenting counter-hegemonic movements and groups, and studying the history and habitus of individuals from those movements
and groups. This can help to guide research away from deterministic or
reductionist approaches and conclusions.
While these are admittedly broad guidelines with perhaps overly ambitious aims, I will to varying degrees attempt to apply them in the following chapter
which critically reviews the existing literature on Western and urban young people and youth culture. Additionally, and by drawing on the lessons discussed in this
chapter, I will operationalize these guidelines in the empirical component of the methodology for this thesis, which is described in Chapter 4. This
operationalization consists of a critical ethnographic, inductive, and discourse analytic methodology that incorporates the study of macro power structures and
ideologically charged discourses, the micro processes and contexts of everyday life, cultural and textual analysis, political-philosophical critical analysis, and
socio-cognition inspired depth-investigations into discourses, audiences, and effects.
79
Chapter Three Young People and Neoliberalism
What We D on’t Know
This chapter uses some of the insights and considerations from, and the guidelines outlined at the end of, the previous chapter to critically examine the
substantive empirical literature concerning mostly Western and urban young people and youth culture. My aims here are to identify some of the gaps in this
literature, and to point to some of the ways that this thesis will attempt to fill those gaps. The literature on young people and youth culture is broad and encompasses
a variety of academic disciplines, however, some of the most prevalent and central themes within it, and those most relevant to this thesis include 1
young people’s agentic engagement with media-culture
, 2 young people’s agenttic construction of their identities, 3 the effects of media-culture on
young people’s cognitive development and subjectivities, and 4 youth political and civic participation. In
the following sections, I will review and critique the literature relating to each of these themes separately. I end the chapter with a summary of some of the lessons
that this broad literature has to offer. While aware of the debates around how to classify teenaged young people e.g., adolescents, youth, young people, emerging
adults etc., in which some scholars argue that terms like ‘adolescent’ denote a
pejorative developmental stage, I will sidestep these concerns on pragmatic grounds, and use different terms to classify young people interchangeably
according to the disciplinary background of the studies being reviewed. As stated above, the literature reviewed in this chapter, encompasses a variety of disciplines
from sociology, to psychology, to political science, each with their own assigned
terminology, which I use accordingly but in a neutral and non-normative manner. 3.1 Cultural Populism: There Is No Such Thing As Society
From the 1980s onwards, the mainstream of youth cultural studies diverted its attention away from more political engagements, and became increasingly
focused on the exploration of how audiences manipulate cultural-media texts for personal enjoyment. Influenced by French post-structuralist theorists like Jacques
Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, this new wave of cultural studies, now loosely referred to by McGugian 2000
as ‘cultural populism’, shifted the
80 ontological approach from what can be considered a critical realism of the past
traditions mentioned in the previous chapter, to a radical subjectivityinterpretative approach Babe, 2009. Popular works like Fiske’s 1988
Television Culture
and Angela McRobbie’s 1994
Postmodernism and Popular Culture,
exemplify this post-structuralist turn in cultural studies. These seek to demonstrate some of the
various ways that audiences manipulate and make their own meanings out of the cultural texts that they engage with free from the manipulative influence and
vested interests of the culture industries and other social institutions. In other words, unlike the classic Birmingham theorists who were interested in the
influence of political-economic and socio-cultural structural constraints on audience reception, cultural populist works seem to dismiss such constraints in
favour of an optimistic and overt celebration of audience autonomy Shildrick MacDonald, 2006, andor a celebration of audience consumption and sub-cultural
practices as sties of political resistance Gibson, 2000. As cultural populism continues to be a dominant and influential strand in the contemporary literature on
youth cultural studies, it merits attention and consideration. However, in this section, I shall only review a brief sample of recent case studies that are
representative of the cultural populist approach, and pay more attention to critiquing it, as this thesis is largely a reaction against this field of academic work.
Among the most dominant characteristics of the cultural populist literature is a redefinition of the term political, which is manifested in the ways cultural-
populist researchers draw on post-subcultural and neo-tribe theories in order to extract political meaning from the banal cultural practices of young people. For
example, in a case study describing the electronic dance music EDM youth culture in the UK, Riley et al., 2010 argue that youth cultural practices, such as
raving and clubbing, should be vie wed as examples of ‘everyday politics’ that
highlight how young people demonstrate sovereignty over their own existence. According to Riley et al., 2010, the traditional conceptions of political activism
and practices as tied to social change agendas is problematic, as political participation does not have to entail dedicated projects aimed at changing society.
Since the EDM culture is seen as autonomous and bottom up, directed and created by young people themselves, it is, therefore, according to the authors, political as
although it may not change the world, it does offer a means for young people to escape from the complacency and conformity of mainstream neoliberal society. In
81 a similar study on the Psytrance music community, Greener Hollands 2006
argue a similar point, stating that Psytrance music provides a space for autonomy and aloofness that should be recognized as examples of ‘everyday politics’. As
they note: In contrast to earlier counter-cultural movements, for whom political
protest wa s seen as intrinsic to the invocation of social change […] the
communal utopian ideologies of the virtual psytrance community point to the idea that simply living a psytrance lifestyle is a powerful tool for
social change and transformation of human consci ousness […]
Although the meanings given to psytrance music do not directly lead to political protest or activity that challenges society directly […] they do
offer some form of challenge to modern hegemonies by offering psytrancers a means of escape or ‘transcendence’ from regular society.
2006, pp. 403-405. Taking this line of thought even further, Beck 2001 and Farthing 2010 argue
that contemporary generations of young people have internalized modes of democracy that are entirely different from those of previous generations. These
modes are generally invisible to most theorists and adults whose only conception of political falls along a spectrum from active political participation to apathy.
Instead, Beck 2001 and Farthing 2010 argue for a third conceptualization that views young people as what they refer
to as ‘radically unpolitical’. According to this alternative view,
young people’s withdrawal from engaged and participatory forms of politics in favour of lives of self-actualization, is itself a deliberate
political act that characterizes the new politics of fun that contemporary young people are creating in the current globalizing environment. As Farthing 2010, p.
190 argues: Young people who refuse to engage in traditional politics, but instead
watch The Simpsons and buy Nike, are perhaps unintentionally acting very politically by depriving politics of their attention and labour, and
ultimately challenging its monopoly of power. Issues of power, the core of politics, are effectively dealt with by simply staying away.
82 The works described above explicitly argue for a political reinterpretation
and recognition of youth cultural practices. However, in other parts of the cultural populist literature, there is sometimes a conscious and explicit omission of
political-economy in favour of a seemingly exclusive focus on the shared cultural content and experiences of young people Babe, 2009; McGuigan, 2010. Take,
for example, Booth’s 2008 textual analysis of users of the social-networking site MySpace. In this analysis, Booth 2008 documents how dedicated fans of popular
media texts not only co-opt and rewrite media texts, but in doing so also reinvent a more interactive form of fandom. While traditional notions of fandom paint fans
as passive a nd doting recipients, Booth’s 2008, p 517 analysis indicates that new
media forums allow fans to, “create personas of fictional television characters, and through role-play with these characters, identify with, and insert themselves into,
the narrative o f that show”. According to Booth, these new digital practices of
contemporary audiences necessitate a shift in the focus of the analysis of audiences away from concerns about political-economy and towards a critical
analysis of shared cultural content. Other recent examples of this exclusive focus on shared cultural content include works by Demant Ostenguards 2007 and
Deadman 2011. In Demans Ostenguards’ 2007 anthropological account of what partying means to Danish young people aged 14
–16, they observed that partying and drinking for their youth participants is an integrated part of their lives
that serves to reaffirm friendships and create new meanings; w hile Dedman’s
2011 ethnography of UK hip-hop and youth grime subcultures offers an account on how groups of young people create and protect the authenticity of their
independent music scene, and details the differences between casual and dedicated practitioners. In rejecting mainstream hip-hop, Dedman 2011 argues, those
dedicated practitioners, who he terms ‘purists’, claim a sense of ownership and
connection to their unique variant of hip-hop music. Admittedly, this has been a brief review. However, the vast majority of what
can be considered cultural populist or ‘post-subcultural’ research, in some way or
other makes similar overall arguments, and draws similar conclusions on youth cultural practices to the ones described above Shildrick MacDonald, 2006.
Like the classic Birmingham School before them, the cultural populist literature offe
rs useful and in depth accounts that demonstrate young people’s inherent agency and creativity. However, as Babe 2009 and McGuigan 2000:2010 note,
83 unlike the Birmingham School approach, this now dominant trend in
contemporary youth cultural studies often takes an apolitical stance that completely ignores the constraints of power, culture, and macro structures, or
seemingly denies that these factors have any influence on individuals whatsoever. As Gill 2008, p. 3 notes in direct reference to the cultural populist literature, “A
paradoxical aspect of the current ‘critical’ writing on this topic is that it reduces
culture to a mere epiphenomenon, rather than seeing it as a collection of practices that can and
do have real, material effects”. If taken to their logical conclusion, cultural populist arguments imply that individuals are completely sovereign and
autonomous agents that are impervious to structural manipulation and fully conscious of the cultural practices and beliefs that they exhibit.
Furthermore, in narrowing the analytic lens to the interpretation and personal manipulation of cultural texts and artefacts, the fact that the night-time production
of cultural commodities is done by workers from the developing world, often in deplorable and slave-like conditions, gets completely ignored Klein, 2000. It is
no exaggeration to claim that the luxury for Western consumers to interpret signs and symbols, which are embedded in material commodities, is reliant on the
exploitation of third-world workers often children and the natural environment. This fact can potentially and understandably be left unnoticed by Western
audiences, as all corporatized culture presents them with are finalized products and enticing advertisements where the exploitation is hidden. Worse still, not only
are these political-economic realities ignored by cultural populist approaches in their valorisation of audience interpretations and uses, but they are in some cases
replaced by disconcerting and overly relativized notions that seemingly read any individual use of popular culture and youth style as political Barker, 2011. The
fact that young people can in some cases produce their own culture rather than ceding it to the market, underpins this central cultural populist argument that
seems to claim that media-culture consumption can be, or is indeed, politically revolutionary Holt, 2002, as hinted at by the Riley et al., 2010 and Hollands
2006 studies described above. However, as Holt 2002, p. 89, inspired by the classic Frankfurt School arguments, notes:
Consumers are revolutionary only insofar as they assist entrepreneurial firms to tear down the old branding paradigm and create opportunities
84 for companies that understand emerging new principles. Revolutionary
consumers helped to create the market for Volkswagen and Nike and accelerated the demise of Sears and Oldsmobile. They never threatened
the market itself. What has been termed “consumer resistance” is actually a form of market-sanctioned cultural experimentation through
which the market rejuvenates itself. Therefore, and as noted at the end of the previous chapter, while it is
important to document how audiences consciously interpret and use culture, the cultural populist approach is problematic because it is exclusively centred on
micro and individual contexts, and that does not take into account how large macro forces are at play. We may never know how we internalize socially
constructed ideas, and make them authentically our own, but there is an explicit danger in completely ignoring the socializing effects of mass media and culture in
favour of arguments for the fully active and fully sovereign consumer McGuigan, 2010:2010a. Such notions, argue Gill 2008 and McGuigan 2000, mirror
neoliberal ontological claims of the fully rational and free-choosing agent, and ignore the manipulative ideological intent of power elites. Therefore, if neoliberal
social reproduction is to be more comprehensively researched, it is crucial to take a more reflective and humble stance that acknowledges manipulation, and to
investigate and recognize the ways in which contemporary social institutions influence, condition, and manipulate our everyday practices and conceptions of
the social world. As Babe 2009, p. 4 argues: To study culture without taking into account either the influence of the
political-economic base or the political-economic consequences of cultural activities is to be naïve in the extreme. These oversights can
cause one to misconstrue oppression as pluralism, persuasion as democratic, and elite control as popular freedom.
85
3.2 Beyond Identity: So What?
