“Failure” operates as a pedagogy in which mistakes are objects of knowledge production, valued insofar as they ensure future success. An attention to “failure” in its visible signs echoes Foucault’s discussion of the “masturbating Child.”  Foucault describes the great efforts mobilized by doctors, educators and parents against the “child’s ‘vice’” of masturbation so as to ensure the child’s “successful” transition into adult sexuality.  While attempts to control the child’s “nature” appear as a “barrier system,” Foucault insists that new, highly productive fields of knowledge about the child’s body and behaviours were opened up and an “incorporation of perversions” resulted (Foucault 1978, 42). I suggest we understand “failure” as a productive and profitable perversion within the neo-liberal economy.  A 2003 New York Times headline provides a succinct illustration: “Japan’s Growth Industry: The Study of Failure.” “Failure” functions as a form of perverse difference, a surplus of energy with potential value extracted through observation and regulation.   But it is a queer form of difference, because on the one hand, it is productive of success when not repeated, and yet it is also productive in its proliferations and mutations.  Perhaps this is why the figure of the Child in Foucault’s History of Sexuality possesses such a doubled potency: the Child is so visibly at risk for failure—an abnormal and unproductive sexuality—and at the same time, the Child is so thrillingly dangerous to society for the risky pleasures it indulges.  Let’s look more closely at this conjunction of risk, children, society, futurity, and deviancy.

According to Beck and Giddens, two major theorists of “risk societies,” energy and capital directed towards development and wealth creation engender risks in the form of environmental hazards and social instabilities.  Failure, loss, collapse, malfunction, disappointment and insecurity appear as natural consequences of those risks.  Young people, already placed in an unstable category of “becoming,” are especially risky figures in these “risk societies.”  Because children are incomplete already—their bodies are only partially developed and cultural skills and literacies are only occasionally mastered—they appear as vulnerable bodies needing protection and “watching out for”—that means lots of surveillance.  Because young people represent the biological future of the family and a reserve of labor, they are watched for signs of perverse derailment.  In this depiction, children are hapless victims of a raging biological process that will “naturally” launch them into an adulthood of heterosexual bliss.  Because children also represent the reproductive future of society they are monitored for intentional disruptions in their engagement with authority and other social relations.  These double and often conflated developmental trajectories of the bio-social mean young people are marked as doubly susceptible to failure.  The stakes are high for successful transitions into adulthood.  As such, young people are made hyper-visible—not just as the social barometers of “risk societies,” but as “risks to society.”  
While multiple nomenclatures are used to designate our contemporary moment and its distinguishing features are debatable, young people have long embodied risk and failure as persistent aspects of modernity.  G. Stanley Hall, writing in 1904 on the “discovery” of the “American adolescent,” described the failure of biology alone to guarantee a child’s successful arrival into maturity: “…every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals.  There is not only arrest, but perversion, at every stage, and hoodlumism, juvenile crime, and secret vice seem….[to] develop in earlier years in every civilized land.  Modern life is hard…on youth” (Stanley 1916, xiv).
In this account, the romantic idealization of childhood as an idyllic journey towards a complete adult is violently interrupted.  Modernity threatens the Child and simultaneously, the Child is transfigured into a monstrous deviant signaling “cultural bankruptcy.”  It is precisely because of the enormous investments in the idea of “youth” as future reproductive agents of both capital and society that young people are scrutinized for this risk of deviancy.  In the literature on adolescent development, deviant young people suffer “failed” or “broken” transitions to “normative adulthood” when they do not demonstrate achievement markers in education, employment, and “mature sexuality” usually indicated through heterosexual family formation.  It is crucial to note that within many youth studies, responsibility for “failed transitions” is frequently traced back to the young people themselves, since within a neo-liberal regime of rational choice and individualized options to select a “unique lifeway,” socio-economic structures are reduced to local circumstances or ignored altogether.

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