Abstract
In spite of the almost unprecedented financial and credit crises gripping the United States, the legacy of jaded excess lives on as both a haunting memory and an ideological register that continues to shape contemporary politics. After all, it was only a few years ago that it was widely recognized, if not celebrated, that the New Gilded Age and its updated “‘dreamworlds’ of consumption, property, and power” had returned to the United States with a vengeance.2 The exorbitantly rich along with their conservative ideologues publicly invoked and celebrated the period in nineteenth-century American history when corporations ruled political, economic, and social life and an allegedly heroic entrepreneurial spirit brought great wealth and prosperity to the rest of the country. Even the New York Times ran a story in the summer of 2007 that contained not only a welcome endorsement of Gilded Age greed but also praise for a growing class of outrageously rich chief executives, financiers, and entrepreneurs, described as “having a flair for business, successfully [breaking] through the stultifying constraints that flowed from the New Deal” and using “their successes and their philanthropy [to make] government less important than it once was.”3 But there was more at work in these examples of Gilded Age excess than a predatory narcissism, a zany hubris, and a neofeudal worldview in which self-interest and the laws of the market were seen as the only true measure of politics.
There is a growing consciousness of children at risk. But … there is also a growing sense of children themselves as the risk—and thus of some children as people out of place and excess populations to be eliminated, while others must be controlled, reshaped, and harnessed to changing social ends. Hence, the centrality of children, both as symbolic figures and as objects of contested forms of socialization in the contemporary politics of culture.
—Sharon Stephens, “Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism’”1
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Notes
Sharon Stephens, “Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism,’” in Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 7.
Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, “Introduction,” Evil Paradises (New York: The New Press, 2007), p. ix.
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 52.
Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2007).
Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (New York: Verso, 2003), p. 29.
Stanley Aronowitz, The Last Good Job in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), p. 160.
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 36–37.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 341.
On the Gilded Age, see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2007)
Michael McHugh, The Second Gilded Age: The Great Reaction in the United States, 1973–2001 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006).
Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists 1861–1901 (reprint) (New York: Harcourt, 2001).
Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” Rethinking Marxism 14:3 (Fall 2002), pp. 49–64.
Nick Couldry, “Reality TV, or the Secret Theater of Neoliberalism,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30:1 (January–March 2008), p. 1.
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15:1 (2003), p. 40.
Kenneth Saltman and David Gabard, eds. Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
Jean Comaroff, “Beyond Bare Life: AIDS, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order,” Public Culture 19:1 (Winter 2007), p. 213.
On the importance of the social state, see Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (London: Polity Press, 2006).
I take these issues up in detail in Henry A. Giroux, The Abandoned Generation (New York: Palgrave, 2004)
Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
John Dilulio, “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” Weekly Standard 1:11 (November 27, 1995), p. 23.
S. D. Levitt, “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18:1 (Winter 2004), pp. 163–190.
Madeleine Bunting, “From Buses to Blogs, a Pathological Individualism Is Poisoning Public Life,” The Guardian/UK (January 28, 2008). Online: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/28/6672/. For a critical examination of these issues, see two classic sources: Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992)
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (London: Polity Press, 2003).
Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11 (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
Susan Searls Giroux, “Generation Kill: Nietzschean Meditations on the University, War, Youth, and Guns,” Works and Days 51/52:1 and 2 (2008), p. 24.
Anya Kamentz, Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young (New York: Riverside, 2006), p. xiii.
Lawrence Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), p. 16.
Lawrence Grossberg, “Why Does Neo-Liberalism Hate Kids? The War on Youth and the Culture of Politics,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 23:2 (2001), p. 133.
I have taken up a detailed critique of No Child Left Behind in Henry A. Giroux, America on the Edge (New York: Palgrave, 2006).
Lee Edelman has argued that claiming the child as a symbol of the future has largely shaped and been used by a politics that places enormous limits on the political field, reproducing what he calls “the privilege of heteronormativity.” While this is no doubt partly true, it is not the only story about the use of the child as a figure either for referencing the political or for employing a discourse about the future that opens up rather than closes down democratic identities, structures, and possibilities. For instance, what are we to make of a right-wing politics that views the child as abject, other, and pathological precisely because children symbolize an element of social responsibility and a notion of the future at odds with the current massive attack on the social state, social investments, and any viable notion of the responsibility to future generations, if not the future itself? Moreover, suggesting that the figure of the child is crucial to understanding the increasing criminalization of young people and the ruthless workings of market fundamentalism in the United States does not assume that the child is the only organizing principle structuring a radical democratic politics. Surely, the discursive deployment of the child should not be rejected as merely a politics “based on a ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism.” For two contrasting positions on this issue, see Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 4
American Academy of Pediatrics, “Prevention of Pediatric Overweight and Obesity,” Pediatrics 112 (August 2003), pp. 424–430.
Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 1999), p. 177.
See, especially, the invaluable political and educational work of Adam Fletcher and the vast array of youth groups he has brought together to address these issues. Adam Fletcher, Youth Voice Handbook: The What, Who, Why, Where, When, and How Youth Voice Happens (Olympia, WA: CommonAction, 2007). See also his work with The Free Child Project. Online: http://www.freechild.org/index.htm.
Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession or the Unconditional University,” in Derrida Down Under, ed. Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth (Auckland, New Zealand: Dunmarra Press, 2001), p. 253.
Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 2.
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© 2009 Henry A. Giroux
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Giroux, H.A. (2009). Introduction: Expendable Futures: Youth and Democracy at Risk. In: Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100565_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100565_1
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