JAC 14.2 Fall 1994
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Slacking Off: Border Youth and Postmodern Educatio

Henry A. Giroux

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For many theorists occupying various positions on the political spectrum,
the current historical moment signals less a need to come to grips with the
new forms of knowledge, experiences, and conditions that constitute
postmodernism than the necessity to write its obituary. The signs of
exhaustion are in part measured by the fact that postmodernism has gripped
two generations of intellectuals who have pondered endlessly over its
meaning and implications as a "social condition and cultural movement"
(Jencks 10). The "postmodern debate" has spurned little consensus and a
great deal of confusion and animosity. The themes are, by now, well known:
master narratives and traditions of knowledge grounded in first principles
are spurned; philosophical principles of canonicity and the notion of the
sacred have become suspect; epistemic certainty and the fixed boundaries of
academic knowledge have been challenged by a "war on totality" and a
disavowal of all- encompassing, single, world-views; rigid distinctions
between high and low culture have been rejected by the insistence that the
products of the so-called mass culture, popular, and folk art forms are
proper objects of study; the Enlightenment correspondence between history
and progress and the modernist faith in rationality, science, and freedom
have incurred a deep-rooted skepticism; the fixed and unified identity of
the humanist subject has been replaced by a call for narrative space that is
pluralized and fluid; and, finally, though far from complete, history is
spurned as a unilinear process that moves the West progressively toward a
final realization of freedom.1

While these and other issues have become central to the postmodern debate,
they are connected through the challenges and provocations they provide to
modernity's conception of history, agency, representation, culture, and the
responsibility of intellectuals. The postmodern challenge constitutes not
only a diverse body of cultural criticism, it must also be seen as a
contextual discourse that has challenged specific disciplinary boundaries in
such fields as literary studies, geography, education, architecture,
feminism, performance art, anthropology, sociology, and many other areas.2
Given its broad theoretical reach, its political anarchism, and its
challenge to "legislating" intellectuals, it is not surprising that there
has been a growing movement on the part of diverse critics to distance
themselves from postmodernism.

While postmodernism may have been elevated to the height of fashion hype in
both academic journals and the popular press in North America during the
last twenty years, it is clear that a more sinister and reactionary mood has
emerged which constitutes something of a backlash. Of course, postmodernism
did become something of a fashion trend, but such events are short lived and
rarely take any subject seriously. But the power of fashion and
commodification should not be underestimated in terms of how such practices
bestow on an issue a cloudy residue of irrelevance and misunderstanding.
There is more at stake in the recent debates on postmodernism than the
effects of fashion and commodification; in fact, the often essentialized
terms in which critiques of postmodernism have been framed suggest something
more onerous. In the excessive rhetorical flourishes that dismiss
postmodernism as reactionary nihilism, fad, or simply a new form of
consumerism, there appears a deep-seated anti-intellectualism, one that
lends credence to the notion that theory is an academic luxury and has
little to do with concrete political practice. Anti- intellectualism aside,
the postmodern backlash also points to a crisis in the way in which the
project of modernity attempts to appropriate, prescribe, and accommodate
issues of difference and indeterminacy.

Much of the criticism that now so blithely dismisses postmodernism appears
trapped in what Zygmunt Bauman refers to as modernist "utopias that served
as beacons for the long march to the rule of reason [which] visualized a
world without margins, leftovers, the unaccounted for--without dissidents
and rebels" (xi). Against the indeterminacy, fragmentation, and skepticism
of the postmodern era, the master narratives of modernism, particularly
Marxism and liberalism, have been undermined as oppositional discourses. One
consequence is that "a whole generation of postwar intellectuals have
experienced an identity crisis. . . . What results is a mood of mourning and
melancholia" (Mercer 424).

The legacy of essentialism and orthodoxy seems to be reasserting itself on
the part of left intellectuals who reject postmodernism as a style of
cultural criticism and knowledge production. It can also be seen in the
refusal on the part of intellectuals to acknowledge the wide-ranging
processes of social and cultural transformation taken up in postmodern
discourses that are appropriate to grasping the contemporary experiences of
youth and the wide-ranging proliferation of forms of diversity within an age
of declining authority, economic uncertainty, the proliferation of
electronic mediated technologies, and the extension of what I call consumer
pedagogy into almost every aspect of youth culture.

In what follows, I want to shift the terms of the debate in which
postmodernism is usually engaged, especially by its more recent critics. In
doing so, I want to argue that postmodernism as a site of "conflicting
forces and divergent tendencies" (Patton 89) becomes useful pedagogically
when it provides elements of an oppositional discourse for understanding and
responding to the changing cultural and educational shift affecting youth in
North America. A resistant or political postmodernism seems invaluable to me
in helping educators and others address the changing conditions of knowledge
production in the context of emerging mass electronic media and the role
these new technologies are playing as critical socializing agencies in
redefining both the locations and the meaning of pedagogy.

My concern with expanding the way in which educators and other cultural
workers understand the political reach and power of pedagogy as it positions
youth within a postmodern culture suggests that postmodernism is to be
neither romanticized nor casually dismissed. On the contrary, I believe that
it is a fundamentally important discourse that needs to be mined critically
in order to help educators to understand the modernist nature of public
schooling in North America.3 It is also useful for educators to comprehend
the changing conditions of identity formation within electronically mediated
cultures and how they are producing a new generation of youths who exist
between the borders of a modernist world of certainty and order, informed by
the culture of the West and its technology of print, and a postmodern world
of hybridized identities, electronic technologies, local cultural practices,
and pluralized public spaces. But before I develop the critical relationship
between postmodern discourse and the promise of pedagogy and its
relationship to border youth, I want to comment further on the recent
backlash against postmodernism and why I believe it reproduces rather than
constructively addresses some of the pedagogical and political problems
affecting contemporary schools and youth.

Welcome to the Postmodern Backlash

While conservatives such a Daniel Bell and his cohorts may see in
postmodernism the worst expression of the radical legacy of the 1960s, an
increasing number of radical critics view postmodernism as the cause of a
wide range of theoretical excesses and political injustices. For example,
recent criticism from British cultural critic John Clarke argues that the
hyper-reality of postmodernism wrongly celebrates and depoliticizes the new
informational technologies and encourages metropolitan intellectuals to
proclaim the end of everything in order to commit themselves to nothing
(especially the materialist problems of the masses).4 Dean MacCannell goes
further and argues that "postmodern writing [is] an expression of soft
fascism" (187). Feminist theorist Susan Bordo dismisses postmodernism as
just another form of "stylish nihilism" and castigates its supporters for
constructing a "world in which language swallows up everything" (291). The
backlash has become so prevalent in North America that the status of popular
criticism and reporting seems to necessitate proclaiming that postmodernism
is "dead." Hence, comments in forums ranging from the editorial pages of the
NEW YORK TIMES to popular texts such as 13THGEN to popular academic
magazines such as the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION alert the general public
in no uncertain terms that it is no longer fashionable to utter the "p"
word.

Of course, more serious critiques have appeared from the likes of J*rgen
Habermas, Perry Anderson, David Harvey, and Terry Eagleton, but the current
backlash has a different intellectual quality to it, a kind of reductionism
that is both disturbing and irresponsible in its refusal to engage
postmodernism in any kind of dialogical, theoretical debate.5 Many of these
left critics often assume the moral high ground and muster their theoretical
machinery within binary divisions that create postmodern fictions, on the
one side, and politically correct, materialist freedom fighters on the
other. One consequence is that any attempt to engage the value and
importance of postmodern discourses critically is sacrificed to the cold
winter winds of orthodoxy and intellectual parochialism. I am not suggesting
that all critics of postmodernism fall prey to such a position, nor am I
suggesting that concerns about the relationship between modernity and
postmodernity, the status of ethics, the crisis of representation and
subjectivity, or the political relevance of postmodern discourses should not
be problematized. But viewing postmodernism as a terrain to be contested
suggests theoretical caution rather than reckless abandonment or casual
dismissal.

What is often missing from these contentious critiques is the recognition
that since postmodernism does not operate under any absolute sign, it might
be more productive to reject any arguments that position postmodernism
within an essentialized politics, an either/or set of strategies. A more
productive encounter would attempt, instead, to understand how
postmodernism's more central insights illuminate how power is produced and
circulated through cultural practices that mobilize multiple relations of
subordination. Rather than proclaiming the end of reason, postmodernism can
be critically analyzed for how successfully it interrogates the limits of
the project of modernist rationality and its universal claims to progress,
happiness, and freedom. Instead of assuming that postmodernism has vacated
the terrain of values, it seems more useful to address how it accounts for
how values are constructed historically and relationally, and how they might
be addressed as the basis or "precondition of a politically engaged
critique" (Butler 6-7). In a similar fashion, instead of claiming that
postmodernism's critique of the essentialist subject denies a theory of
subjectivity, it seems more productive to examine how its claims about the
contingent character of identity, constructed in a multiplicity of social
relations and discourses, redefines the notion of agency. One example of
this type of inquiry comes from Judith Butler, who argues that acknowledging
that "the subject is constituted is not [the same as claiming] that it is
determined; on the contrary, the constituted character of the subject is the
very precondition of its agency" ("Contingent Foundations" 13). The now
familiar argument that postmodernism substitutes representations for reality
indicates less an insight than a reductionism that refuses to engage
critically how postmodern theories of representation work to give meaning to
reality.

A postmodern politics of representation might be better served through an
attempt to understand how power is mobilized in cultural terms, how images
are used on a national and local scale to create a representational politics
that is reorienting traditional notions of space and time. A postmodern
discourse could also be evaluated through the pedagogical consequences of
its call to expand the meaning of literacy by broadening "the range of texts
we read, and . . . the ways in which we read them" (BŐrubŐ 75). The fact of
the matter is that the mass media plays a decisive role in the lives of
young people, and the issue is not whether such media perpetuate dominant
power relations but how youth and others experience the culture of the media
differently (Tomlinson 40). Postmodernism pluralizes the meaning of culture,
while modernism firmly situates it theoretically in apparatuses of power. It
is precisely in this dialectical interplay between difference and power that
postmodernism and modernism inform each other rather than cancel each other
out. The dialectical nature of the relationship that postmodernism has to
modernism warrants a theoretical moratorium on critiques that affirm or
negate postmodernism on the basis of whether it represents a break from
modernism. The value of postmodernism lies elsewhere.

Acknowledging both the reactionary and progressive moments in postmodernism,
anti-essentialist cultural work might take up the challenge of "writing the
political back into the postmodern," while simultaneously radicalizing the
political legacy of modernism in order to promote a new vision of radical
democracy in a postmodern world (Ebert 291). One challenge in the debate
over postmodernism is whether its more progressive elements can further our
understanding of how power works, how social identities are formed, and how
the changing conditions of the global economy and the new informational
technologies can be articulated to meet the challenges posed by progressive
cultural workers and the new social movements. More specifically, the issue
for critical educators lies in appropriating postmodernism as part of a
broader pedagogical project which reasserts the primacy of the political
while simultaneously engaging the most progressive aspects of modernism.
Postmodernism becomes relevant to the extent that it becomes part of a
broader political project in which the relationship between modernism and
postmodernism becomes dialectical, dialogic, and critical.

In what follows, I want to illuminate and then analyze some of the tensions
between schools as modernist institutions and the fractured conditions a
postmodern culture of youth along with the problems they pose for critical
educators. First, there is the challenge of understanding the modernist
nature of existing schooling and its refusal to relinquish a view of
knowledge, culture, and order that undermines the possibility for
constructing a radical democratic project in which a shared conception of
citizenship simultaneously challenges growing regimes of oppression and
struggles for the conditions needed to construct a multiracial and
multicultural democracy. Second, there is a need for cultural workers to
address the emergence of a new generation of youth who are increasingly
constructed within postmodern economic and cultural conditions that are
almost entirely ignored by the schools. Third, there is the challenge to
critically appropriate those elements of a postmodern pedagogy that might be
useful in educating youth to be the subjects of history in a world that is
increasingly diminishing the possibilities for radical democracy and global
peace.

Modernist Schools and Postmodern Conditions

Wedded to the language of order, certainty, and mastery, public schools are
facing a veritable sea change in the demographic, social, and cultural
composition of the United States for which they are radically unprepared. As
thoroughly modernist institutions, public schools have long relied upon
moral, political, and social technologies that legitimate an abiding faith
in the Cartesian tradition of rationality, progress, and history. The
consequences are well known. Knowledge and authority in the school curricula
are organized not to eliminate differences but to regulate them through
cultural and social divisions of labor. Class, racial, and gender
differences are either ignored in school curricula or subordinated to the
imperatives of a history and culture that is linear and uniform.

Within the discourse of modernism, knowledge draws its boundaries almost
exclusively from a European model of culture and civilization and connects
learning to the mastery of autonomous and specialized bodies of knowledge.
Informed by modernist traditions, schooling becomes an agent of those
political and intellectual technologies associated with what Ian Hunter
terms the "governmentalizing" of the social order. The result is a
pedagogical apparatus regulated by a practice of ordering that views
"contingency as an enemy and order as a task" (Bauman xi). The practice of
ordering, licensing, and regulating that structures public schooling is
predicated on a fear of difference and indeterminacy. The effects reach deep
into the structure of public schooling and include: an epistemic arrogance
and faith in certainty sanctions pedagogical practices and public spheres in
which cultural differences are viewed as threatening; knowledge becomes
positioned in the curricula as an object of mastery and control; the
individual student is privileged as a unique source of agency irrespective
of iniquitous relations of power; the technology and culture of the book is
treated as the embodiment of modernist high learning and the only legitimate
object of pedagogy.

While the logic of public schooling may be utterly modernist, it is neither
monolithic nor homogeneous. But at the same time, the dominant features of
public schooling are characterized by a modernist project that has
increasingly come to rely upon instrumental reason and the standardization
of curricula. In part, this can be seen in the regulation of class, racial,
and gender differences through rigid forms of testing, sorting, and
tracking. The rule of reason reveals its Western cultural legacy in highly
centered curricula that more often than not privilege the histories,
experiences, and cultural capital of largely white, middle class students.
Moreover, the modernist nature of public schooling is evident in the refusal
of educators to incorporate popular culture into the curricula or to take
account of the new electronically mediated, informational systems in the
postmodern age that are generating massively new socializing contexts for
contemporary youth.

The emerging conditions of indeterminacy and hybridity that the public
schools face but continue to ignore can be seen in a number of elements that
characterize what I loosely call postmodern culture. First, the United
States is experiencing a new wave of immigration which, by the end of this
century, may exceed in volume and importance the last wave at the turn of
the twentieth century. Key geographic areas within the country--chiefly the
large metropolitan regions of the Northeast and Southwest, including
California--and major public institutions (especially those of social
welfare and education) are grappling with entirely new populations that
bring with them new needs. In 1940, seventy percent of immigrants came from
Europe, but in 1992 only fifteen percent came from Europe while 44 percent
came from Latin America and 37 percent came from Asia. National identity can
no longer be seen through the lens of cultural uniformity or enforced
through the discourse of assimilation. A new postmodern culture has emerged
marked by specificity, difference, plurality, and multiple narratives.

Second, the sense of possibility that has informed the American Dream of
material well-being and social mobility is no longer matched by an economy
that can sustain such dreams. In the last two decades, the American economy
has entered a prolonged era of stagnation, punctuated by short-term growth
spurts. In the midst of an ongoing recession and declining real incomes for
low- and middle-income groups, the prospects for economic growth over the
next period of US history appear extremely limited. The result has been the
expansion of service economy jobs and an increase in the number of companies
that are downsizing and cutting labor costs in order to meet global
competition. Not only are full-time jobs drying up, but there has also been
a surge in the "number of Americans--perhaps as many as 37 million--[who]
are employed in something other than full-time permanent positions" (Jost
633). These so-called "contingent workers" are "paid less than full-time
workers and often get no health benefits, no pensions and no paid holidays,
sick days or vacations" (Just 628). Massive unemployment and diminishing
expectations have become a way of life for youth all over North America.
MACLEAN'S MAGAZINE reports that in Canada, "People ages 15 to 24 are
currently facing unemployment rates of more than 20 percent, well above the
national average of 10.8 percent" (Blythe 35). For most contemporary youth,
the promise of economic and social mobility no longer warrants the
legitimating claims it held for earlier generations of young people. The
signs of despair among this generation are everywhere. Surveys strongly
suggest that contemporary youth from diverse classes, races, ethnicities,
and cultures "believe it will be much harder for them to get ahead than it
was for their parents--and are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the
long-term fate of their generation and nation" (Howe and Strauss 16).

Clinging to the modernist script that technological growth necessitates
progress, educators refuse to give up the long-held assumption that school
credentials provide the best route to economic security and class mobility.
While such a truth may have been relevant to the industrializing era, it is
no longer sustainable within the post-Fordist economy of the West. New
economic conditions call into question the efficacy of mass schooling in
providing the "well-trained" labor force that employers required in the
past. In light of these shifts, it seems imperative that educators and other
cultural workers reexamine the mission of the schools. Rather than accepting
modernist assumption that schools should train students for specific labor
tasks, it makes more sense in the present historical moment to educate
students to theorize differently about the meaning of work in a postmodern
world. Indeterminacy rather than order should become the guiding principle
of a pedagogy in which multiple views, possibilities, and differences are
opened up as part of an attempt to read the future contingently rather than
from the perspective of a master narrative that assumes rather than
problematizes specific notions of work, progress, and agency. Under such
circumstances, schools need to redefine curricula within a postmodern
conception of culture linked to the diverse and changing global conditions
that necessitate new forms of literacy, a vastly expanded understanding of
how power works within cultural apparatuses, and a keener sense of how the
existing generation of youth is being produced within a society in which
mass media plays a decisive if not unparalleled role in constructing
multiple and diverse social identities.

As Stanley Aronowitz and I point out elsewhere:

Few efforts are being made to rethink the ENTIRE curriculum in the
light of the new migration and immigration, much less develop entirely
different pedagogies. In secondary schools and community colleges for
example, students still study "subjects"--social studies, math,
science, English and "foreign" languages. Some schools have "added"
courses in the history and culture of Asian, Latin American and
Caribbean societies, but have little thought of transforming the entire
humanities and social studies curricula in the light of the cultural
transformations of the school. Nor are serious efforts being made to
integrate the sciences with social studies and the humanities; hence,
science and math are still being deployed as sorting devises in most
schools rather than seen as crucial markers of a genuinely innovative
approach to learning. (SIEGE 6)

As modernist institutions, public schools have been unable to open up the
possibility of thinking through the indeterminate character of the economy,
knowledge, culture, and identity. Hence, it has become difficult, if not
impossible, for such institutions to understand how social identities are
fashioned and struggled over within political and technological conditions
that have produced a crisis in the ways in which culture is organized in the
West.

Border Youth and Postmodern Culture

The programmed instability and transitoriness characteristically widespread
among a generation of eighteen to twenty-five year old border youth is
inextricably rooted in a larger set of postmodern cultural conditions
informed by the following assumptions: a general loss of faith in the
modernist narratives of work and emancipation; the recognition that the
indeterminacy of the future warrants confronting and living in the immediacy
of experience; an acknowledgment that homelessness as a condition of
randomness has replaced the security, if not misrepresentation, of home as a
source of comfort and security; an experience of time and space as
compressed and fragmented within a world of images that increasingly
undermine the dialectic of authenticity and universalism. For border youth,
plurality and contingency--whether mediated through the media or through the
dislocations spurned by the economic system, the rise of new social
movements, or the crisis of representation--have resulted in a world with
few secure psychological, economic, or intellectual markers. This is a world
in which one is condemned to wander across, within, and between multiple
borders and spaces marked by excess, otherness, difference, and a
dislocating notion of meaning and attention. The modernist world of
certainty and order has given way to a planet in which hip hop and rap
condenses time and space into what Paul Virilio calls "speed space." No
longer belonging to any one place or location, youth increasingly inhabit
shifting cultural and social spheres marked by a plurality of languages and
cultures.

Communities have been refigured as space and time mutate into multiple and
overlapping cyberspace networks. Youth talk to each other over electronic
bulletin boards in coffee houses in North Beach, California. Cafes and other
public salons, once the refuge of beatniks, hippies, and other cultural
radicals have given way to members of the hacker culture. They reorder their
imaginations through connections to virtual reality technologies, and lose
themselves in images that wage a war on traditional meaning by reducing all
forms of understanding to random access spectacles.

This is not meant to endorse a Frankfurt School dismissal of mass or popular
culture in the postmodern age. On the contrary, I believe that the new
electronic technologies with their proliferation of multiple stories and
open-ended forms of interaction have altered not only the context for the
production of subjectivities, but also how people "take in information and
entertainment" (Parkes 54). Values no longer emerge from the modernist
pedagogy of foundationalism and universal truths, or from traditional
narratives based on fixed identities with their requisite structure of
closure. For many youths, meaning is en route, the media has become a
substitute for experience, and what constitutes understanding is grounded in
a decentered and diasporic world of difference, displacement, and exchanges.

I want to take up the concept of border youth through a general analysis of
some recent films that have attempted to portray the plight of young people
within the conditions of a postmodern culture. I will focus on three films:
RIVER'S EDGE (1986), MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991), and SLACKERS (1991). All
of these films point not only to some of the economic and social conditions
at work in the formation of youth, but they often do so within a narrative
that combines a politics of despair with a fairly sophisticated depiction of
the sensibilities and moods of a generation of youth. The challenge for
critical educators is to question how a critical pedagogy might be employed
to cancel out the worst dimensions of postmodern cultural criticism while
appropriating some of its more radical aspects. At the same time, there is
the issue of how a politics and project of pedagogy can be constructed to
create the conditions for social agency and institutionalized change among
postmodern youth.

For many postmodern youth, showing up for adulthood at the fin de siScle
means pulling back on hope and trying to put off the future rather than
taking up the modernist challenge of trying to shape it. Postmodern cultural
criticism has captured much of the ennui among youth and has made clear that
"What used to be the pessimism of a radical fringe is now the shared
assumption of a generation" (Anshaw 27). Postmodern cultural criticism has
helped to alert educators and others to the fault lines marking a
generation, regardless of race or class, that seems neither motivated by
nostalgia for some lost conservative vision of America nor at home in the
New World Order paved with the promises of the expanding electronic
information highway. For most commentators, youth have become "strange,"
"alien," and disconnected from the real world. For instance, in Gus Van
Sant's film, MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, the main character Mike, who hustles his
sexual wares for money, is a dreamer lost in fractured memories of a mother
who deserted him as a child. Caught between flashbacks of Mom shown in 8mm
color, and the video world of motley street hustlers and their clients, Mike
moves through his existence by falling asleep in times of stress only to
awake in different geographic and spatial locations. What holds Mike's
psychic and geographic travels together is the metaphor of sleep, the dream
of escape, and the ultimate realization that even memories cannot fuel hope
for the future. Mike becomes a metaphor for an entire generation forced to
sell themselves in a world with no hope, a generation that aspires to
nothing, works at degrading McJobs, and live in a world in which chance and
randomness rather than struggle, community, and solidarity drive their fate.

A more disturbing picture of youth can be found in RIVER'S EDGE. Teenage
anomie and drugged apathy are given painful expression in the depiction of a
group of working class youth who are casually told by John, one of their
friends, that he has strangled his girlfriend, another of the group's
members, and left her nude body on the riverbank. The group members at
different times visit the site to view and probe the dead body of the girl.
Seemingly unable to grasp the significance of the event, the youths
initially hold off in informing anyone of the murder and with different
degrees of concern initially try to protect John, the teenage sociopath,
from being caught by the police. The youths in RIVER'S EDGE drift through a
world of broken families, blaring rock music, schooling marked by dead time,
and a general indifference to life in general. Decentered and fragmented,
they view death like life itself as merely a spectacle, a matter of style
rather than substance. In one sense, these youths share the quality of being
"asleep" that is depicted in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO. But what is more
disturbing in RIVER'S EDGE is that lost innocence gives way not merely to
teenage myopia, but to a culture in which human life is experienced as a
voyeuristic seduction, a video game, good for passing time and diverting
oneself from the pain of the moment. Despair and indifference cancel out the
language of ethical discriminations and social responsibility while
elevating the immediacy of pleasure to the defining moment of agency. In
RIVER'S EDGE, history as social memory is reassembled through vignettes of
1960s types portrayed as either burned out bikers or as the ex-radical
turned teacher whose moralizing relegates politics to simply cheap
opportunism. Exchanges among the young people in RIVER'S EDGE appear like
projections of a generation waiting either to fall asleep or to commit
suicide. After talking about how he murdered his girlfriend, John blurts
out, "You do shit, its done, and then you die." Pleasure, violence, and
death, in this case, reassert how a generation of youth takes seriously the
dictum that life imitates art or how life is shaped within a violent culture
of images in which, as another character states, "It might be easier being
dead." To which her boyfriend, a Wayne's world type, replies, "Bullshit you
couldn't get stoned anymore." RIVER'S EDGE and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO reveal
the seamy and dark side of a youth culture while employing the Hollywood
mixture of fascination and horror to titillate the audiences drawn to these
films. Employing the postmodern aesthetic of revulsion, locality,
randomness, and senselessness, youths in these films appear to be
constructed outside of a broader cultural and economic landscape. Instead,
they become visible only through visceral expressions of psychotic behavior
or the brooding experience of a self-imposed comatose alienation.

One of the more celebrated youth films of the 1990s is Richard Linklater's
SLACKER. A decidedly low-budget film, SLACKER attempts in both form and
content to capture the sentiments of a twenty- something generation of white
youth who reject most of the values of the Reagan/Bush era but have a
difficult time imagining what an alternative might look like. Distinctly
non-linear in its format, SLACKER takes place in a twenty-four hour time
frame in the college town of Austin, Texas. Borrowing its anti-narrative
structure from films such as Luis Bunuel's PHANTOM OF LIBERTY and Max
Ophlus' LA RHONDE, SLACKER is loosely organized around brief episodes in the
lives of a variety of characters, none of whom are connected to each other
except that each provides the pretext to lead the audience to the next
character in the film. Sweeping through bookstores, coffee shops, auto-parts
yards, bedrooms, and nightclubs, SLACKER focuses on a disparate group of
young people who possess little hope for the future and drift from job to
job speaking a hybrid argot of bohemian intensities and new-age, pop- cult
babble. The film portrays a host of young people who randomly move from one
place to the next, border crossers with no sense of where they have come
from or where they are going. In this world of multiple realities,
"schizophrenia emerges as the psychic norm of late capitalism" (Hebdige 88).
Characters work in bands with names like "Ultimate Loser," talk about being
forcibly put in hospitals by their parents, and one neo-punker attempts to
sell a Madonna pap smear to two acquaintances she meets in the street:
"Check it out, I know it's kind of disgusting, but it's like sort of getting
down to the real Madonna." This is a world in which language is wedded to an
odd mix of nostalgia, popcorn philosophy, and MTV babble. Talk is organized
around comments like: "I don't know. I've traveled, and when you get back
you can't tell whether it really happened to you or if you just saw it on
TV." Alienation is driven inward and emerges in comments like, "I feel
stuck." Irony slightly overshadows a refusal to imagine any kind of
collective struggle. Reality seems too despairing to care about. This is
humorously captured in one instance by a young man who suggests, "You know
how the slogan goes, 'Workers of the world, unite'? We say workers of the
world, relax." People talk but appear disconnected from themselves and each
other; lives traverse each other with no sense of community or connection.
There is a pronounced sense in SLACKER of youth caught in the throes of new
information technologies that both contain their aspirations while at the
same time holding out the promise of some sense of agency. At rare moments
in the film, the political paralysis of solipsistic refusal is offset by
instances in which some characters recognize the importance of the image as
a vehicle for cultural production, as a representational apparatus that
cannot only make certain experiences available but can also be used to
produce alternative realities and social practices. The power of the image
is present in the way the camera follows characters throughout the film, at
once stalking them and confining them to a gaze that is both constraining
and incidental. In one scene, a young man appears in a video apartment
surrounded by televisions that he claims he has had on for years. He points
out that he has invented a game called a "Video Virus" in which through the
use of a special technology he can push a button and insert himself onto any
screen and perform any one of a number of actions. When asked by another
character what this is about, he answers: "Well, we all know the psychic
powers of the televised image. But we need to capitalize on it and make it
work for us instead of working for it." This theme is taken up in two other
scenes. In one short clip, a history graduate student shoots the video
camera he is using to film himself, indicating a self-consciousness about
the power of the image and the ability to control it at the same time. In a
scene with which the film concludes, a carload of people, each equipped with
a Super 8 camera, drives up to a large hill and the people throw their
cameras into a canyon. The film ends with the images being recorded by the
cameras as they cascade to the bottom of the cliff in what suggests a moment
of release and liberation. Within the postmodern culture depicted in these
three films, there are no master narratives at work, no epic modernist
dreams, nor is there any element of social agency that accompanies the
individualized sense of dropping out, of self-consciously courting chaos and
uncertainty.

In many respects, these movies present a slacker culture of white youth who
are both terrified and fascinated by the media, who appear overwhelmed by
"the danger and wonder of future technologies, the banality of consumption,
the thrill of brand names, [and] the difficulty of sex in alienated
relationships" (Kopkind 183). The significance of these films rests, in
part, in their attempt to capture the sense of powerlessness that
increasingly cuts across race, class, and generations. But what is missing
from these films along with the various books, articles, and reportage
concerning what is often called "The Nowhere Generation," "Generation X,"
"13thGen," or "Slackers" is any sense of the larger political and social
conditions in which youth are being framed. What in fact should be seen as a
social commentary about "dead-end capitalism" emerges simply as a
celebration of refusal dressed up in a rhetoric of aesthetics, style,
fashion, and solipsistic protests. Within this type of commentary,
postmodern criticism is useful but limited because of its often theoretical
inability to take up the relationship between identity and power, biography
and the commodification of everyday life, or the limits of agency in a
post-Fordist economy as part of a broader project of possibility linked to
issues of history, struggle, and transformation. The contours of this type
of criticism are captured in a comment by Andrew Kopkind, a keen observer of
slacker culture:

The domestic and economic relationship that have created the new
consciousness are not likely to improve in the few years left in this
century, or in the years of the next, when the young slackers will be
middle-agers. The choices for young people will be increasingly
constricted. In a few years, a steady job at a mall outlet or a food
chain may be all that's left for the majority of college graduates.
Life is more and more like a lottery--is a lottery--with nothing but
the luck of the draw determining whether you get a recording contract,
get your screenplay produced, or get a job with your M.B.A. Slacking is
thus a rational response to casino capitalism, the randomization of
success, and the utter arbitrariness of power. If no talent is still
enough, why bother to hone your skills? If it is impossible to find a
good job, why not slack out and enjoy life? (187)

The pedagogical challenge represented by the emergence of a postmodern
generation of youth has not been lost on advertisers and market research
analysts. According to a 1992 roper Organization study, the current
generation of eighteen to twenty-nine year olds has an annual buying power
of 125 billion. Addressing the interests and tastes of this generation,
"McDonald's, for instance, has introduced hip-hop music and images to
promote burgers and fries, ditto Coca-Cola, with its frenetic commercials
touting Coca- Cola Classic" (Hollingsworth 30). Benetton, Reebok, and other
companies have followed suit in their attempts to mobilize the desires,
identities, and buying patterns of a new generation of youth. What appears
as a dire expression of the postmodern condition to some theorists, becomes
for others a challenge to invent new market strategies for corporate
interests. In this scenario, youth may be experiencing the conditions of
postmodernism, but corporate advertisers are attempting to theorize a
pedagogy of consumption as part of a new way of appropriating postmodern
differences. What educators need to do is to make the pedagogical more
political by addressing both the conditions through which they teach and
what it means to learn from a generation that is experiencing life in a way
that is vastly different from the representations offered in modernist
versions of schooling. The emergence of the electronic media coupled with a
diminishing faith in the power of human agency has undermined the
traditional visions of schooling and the meaning of pedagogy. The language
of lesson plans and upward mobility and the forms of teacher authority on
which it was based has been radically delegitimated by the recognition that
culture and power are central to the authority/knowledge relationship.
Modernism's faith in the past has given way to a future for which
traditional markers no longer make sense.

Postmodern Education

In this section, I want to develop the thesis that postmodern discourses
offer the promise, but not the solution, for alerting educators to a new
generation of border youth. Indications of the conditions and
characteristics that define such youth are far from uniform or agreed upon.
But the daunting fear of essentializing the category of youth should not
deter educators and cultural critics from addressing the effects on a
current generation of young people who appear hostage to the vicissitudes of
a changing economic order with its legacy of diminished hopes, on the one
hand, and a world of schizoid images, proliferating public spaces and an
increasing fragmentation, uncertainty, and randomness that structures
postmodern daily life on the other. Central to this issue is whether
educators are dealing with a new kind of student forged within organizing
principles shaped by the intersection of the electronic image, popular
culture, and a dire sense of indeterminacy. Differences aside, the concept
of border youth represents less a distinct class, membership, or social
group than a referent for naming and understanding the emergence of a set of
conditions, translations, border crossings, attitudes, and dystopian
sensibilities among youth that cut across race and class and that represent
a fairly new phenomenon. In this scenario, the experiences of contemporary
Western youth in the late modern world are being ordered around coordinates
that structure the experience of everyday life outside of the unified
principles and maps of certainty that offered up comfortable and secure
representations to previous generations. Youth increasingly rely less on the
maps of modernism to construct and affirm their identities; instead, they
are faced with the task of finding their way through a decentered cultural
landscape no longer caught in the grip of a technology of print, closed
narrative structures, or the certitude of a secure economic future. The
emerging technologies which construct and position youth represent
interactive terrains that cut across "language and culture, without
narrative requirements, without character complexities. . . . Narrative
complexity [has given] way to design complexity; story [has given] way to a
sensory environment" (Parkes 50).

A postmodern pedagogy must address the shifting attitudes, representations,
and desires of this new generation of youth being produced within the
current historical, economic, and cultural juncture. For example, the terms
of identity and the production of new maps of meaning must be understood
within new hybridized cultural practices inscribed in relations of power
that intersect differently with race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
But such differences must be understood not only in terms of the context of
their struggles but also through a shared language of resistance that points
to a project of hope and possibility. This is where the legacy of a critical
modernism becomes valuable in that it reminds us of the importance of the
language of public life, democratic struggle, and the imperatives of
liberty, equality, and justice.

Educators need to understand how different identities among youth are being
produced in spheres generally ignored by schools. Included here would be an
analysis of how pedagogy works to produce, circulate, and confirm particular
forms of knowledge and desires in those diverse public and popular spheres
where sounds, images, print, and electronic culture attempt to harness
meaning for and against the possibility of expanding social justice and
human dignity. Shopping malls, street communities, video halls, coffee
shops, television culture, and other elements of popular culture must become
serious objects of school knowledge. But more is at stake here than an
ethnography of those public spheres where individual and social identities
are constructed and struggled over. More important is the need to fashion a
language of ethics and politics that serves to discriminate between
relations that do violence and those that promote diverse and democratic
public cultures through which youth and others can understand their problems
and concerns as part of a larger effort to interrogate and disrupt the
dominant narratives of national identity, economic privilege, and individual
empowerment.

Pedagogy must redefine its relationship to modernist forms of culture,
privilege, and canonicity, and serve as vehicle of translation and
cross-fertilization. Pedagogy as a critical cultural practice needs to open
up new institutional spaces in which students can experience and define what
it means to be cultural producers capable of both reading different texts
and producing them, of moving in and out of theoretical discourses but never
losing sight of the need to theorize for themselves. Moreover if critical
educators are to move beyond the postmodern prophets of hyperreality,
politics must not be exclusively fashioned to plugging into the new
electronically mediated community. The struggle for power is not merely
about expanding the range of texts that constitute the politics of
representation, it is also about struggling within and against those
institutions that wield economic, cultural, and economic power.

It is becoming increasingly fashionable to argue for a postmodern pedagogy
in which it is important to recognize that "One chief effect of electronic
hypertext lies in the way it challenges now conventional assumptions about
teachers, learners, and the institutions they inhabit" (Landow 120). As
important as this concern is for refiguring the nature of the relationship
between authority and knowledge and the pedagogical conditions necessary for
decentering the curriculum and opening up new pedagogical spaces, it does
not go far enough and runs the risk of degenerating into a another hyped up
methodological fix. Postmodern pedagogy must be more sensitive to how
teachers and students negotiate both texts and identities, but it must do so
through a political project that articulates its own authority within a
critical understanding of how the self recognizes others as subjects rather
than as objects of history. In other words, postmodern pedagogy must address
how power is written on, within, and between different groups as part of a
broader effort to reimagine schools as democratic public spheres. Authority
in this instance is linked to auto-critique and becomes a political and
ethical practice through which students become accountable to themselves and
others. By making the political project of schooling primary, educators can
define and debate the parameters through which communities of difference
defined by relations of representation and reception within overlapping and
transnational systems of information, exchange, and distribution can address
what it means to be educated as a practice of empowerment. In this instance,
schools can be rethought as public spheres, as "borderlands of crossing"
(Clifford 134), actively engaged in producing new forms of democratic
community organized as sites of translation, negotiation, and resistance.

What is also needed by postmodern educators is a more specific understanding
of how affect and ideology mutually construct the knowledge, resistances,
and sense of identity that students negotiate as they work through dominant
and rupturing narratives attempting in different ways to secure particular
forms of authority. Fabienne Worth is right in castigating postmodern
educators for undervaluing the problematic nature of the relationship
between "desire and the critical enterprise" (8). A postmodern pedagogy
needs to address how the issue of authority can be linked to democratic
processes in the classroom that do not promote pedagogical terrorism and yet
still offer representations, histories, and experiences that allow students
to critically address the construction of their own subjectivities as they
simultaneously engage in an ongoing "process of negotiation between the self
and other" (26).

The conditions and problems of contemporary border youth may be postmodern,
but they will have to be engaged through a willingness to interrogate the
world of public politics while at the same time recognizing the limits of
postmodernism's more useful insights. In part, this means rendering
postmodernism more political by appropriating modernity's call for a better
world while abandoning its linear narratives of Western history, unified
culture, disciplinary order, and technological progress. In this case, the
pedagogical importance of uncertainty and indeterminacy can be rethought
through a modernist notion of the dream-world in which youth and others can
shape, without the benefit of master narratives, the conditions for
producing new ways of learning, engaging, and positing the possibilities for
social struggle and solidarity. Radical educators cannot subscribe either to
an apocalyptic emptiness or to a politics of refusal that celebrates the
immediacy of experience over the more profound dynamic of social memory and
moral outrage forged within and against conditions of exploitation,
oppression, and the abuse of power. Postmodern pedagogy needs to confront
history as more than simulacrum and ethics as something other than the
casualty of incommensurable language games. Postmodern educators need to
take a stand without standing still, to engage their own politics as public
intellectuals without essentializing the ethical referents to address human
suffering.

In addition, a postmodern pedagogy needs to go beyond a call for refiguring
the curriculum so as to include new informational technologies; instead, it
needs to assert a politics that makes the relationship among authority,
ethics, and power central to a pedagogy that expands rather than closes down
the possibilities of a radical democratic society. Within this discourse,
images do not dissolve reality into simply another text; on the contrary,
representations become central to revealing the structures of power
relations at work in the public, schools, society, and larger global order.
Difference does not succumb to fashion in this logic (another touch of
ethnicity); instead, difference becomes a marker of struggle in an ongoing
movement toward a shared conception of justice and a radicalization of the
social order. Penn State University University Park, Pennsylvania
-------------------------------------------------------------------- --------

Notes

1For a succinct examination of postmodernism's challenge to a modernist
conception of history, see Vattimo, especially chapter one.

2A number of excellent anthologies provide readings in postmodernism that
cut across a variety of fields. Some of the more recent examples include
Jencks; Natioli and Hutcheon; and Docherty.

3I treat this issue in great detail in SCHOOLING and BORDER.

4See Clarke, especially Chapter 2. Clarke's analysis has less to do with a
complex reading of postmodernism than a defensive reaction of his own
refusal to take seriously a postmodern critique of the modernist elements in
Marxist theories.

5 Needless to say, one can find a great deal of theoretical material that
refuses to dismiss postmodern discourses so easily and in doing so performs
a theoretical service in unraveling its progressive from its reactionary
tendencies. Early examples of this work can be found in Foster; Hebdige;
Vattimo; Ross; Hutcheon; Collins; and Connor. More recent examples include
Nicholson; Lasch; Chambers; Aronowitz and Giroux, POSTMODERN; Best and
Kellner; Denzin; and Owens.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- --------

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