Failure, Deviancy, and Framings of Youth
“Failure” is often instrumentalized as a pedagogy in which mistakes are objects of knowledge production, valued insofar as they ensure future success. But when it comes to kids, “failure” is a read as a risk to the social future. In later sections this relation between youth, the future, and failure will be dealt with more thoroughly, but here I want to provide an initial focus on how skateboarding intersects with some central ideas around youth deviancy, risk, and globalized commodification.
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” (Hall 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.
I want to focus on skateboarding as a particular practice of contemporary “failures” and deviancies that continue in a longer genealogy of youthful wreckage of body, mind, and morals. As a practice (I hesitate to call it “sport”) skateboarding is a dynamic operation between the body, the architecture of the city, and the relation between the skateboarder’s imaginings of and responses to the possibilities available in the space of the city. To watch skateboarding is confusing for its lack of apparent rules, patterns or pre-given choreography. Skateboarding is improvisational, incoherent in its evaluation of risk and success, and results in frequent, sensational falls and fantastic injuries. Its immediate physical pleasures are not readily visible. However, skateboarding-as-signifier exceeds this risky practice and represents a dense imbrication of subcultural codes of style and performance, intense gender construction, and commercially successful packaging of “rebellion” within popular visual culture. The signifier of “skateboarding” is heavily overdetermined. With the massively popular Tony Hawk “American Wasteland” video game, MTV’s “Viva La Bam” reality show, ESPN’s “X Games”, and hip hop superstar Lil Wayne’s newly formed skate shoe company, skateboarding has become a common signifier and profitable commodity in global youth culture. The physical risks of skateboarding are translated into an even riskier symbol of social disorder that is then contained within structures of capitalist media production. In a hegemonic turn, the sheer profitability of skateboarding as a risky and deviant commodity suggests the energies of young people have been successfully contained within the productive identity of “consumer.” At the same time however, actual skateboarders on the streets confront intensifying techniques intended to restrain their risky behaviors. Defensive architectural modifications to curbs, benches and stairs are implemented to interdict the random energies of skateboarding and confirm the privilege of property against “illegal use.” Curfews, citywide skateboarding bans, and increasing police harassment under “anti-gang” policies in the U.S. have helped criminalize skateboarders themselves. The “consumer” and “criminal” categories of containment are predicated on the ideology of protection for the Child and its interests that are presumed to be synonymous with society’s future. This ideology of protection requires that the Child be available to the gaze of society so as to minimize the mutual danger and risk the Child and society pose to one another. The consumer/criminal typologies serve to make “youth” and its vulnerability to failure legible and visible.
Skateboarding strikingly manifests this double risk. When well managed as a commodity form, the criminalized body of the skateboarder embodies a highly desirable form of “youthful” cool. Through deviant practice, skateboarding authenticates signified risks that in turn produce a hefty profit margin—skateboards and equipment alone generate nearly 1.4 billion dollars in annual sales. This commodification of skateboarding-as-signifier threatens to overwhelm the real bodily experiences of the skaters themselves. This “double risk” might be usefully understood as a kind of schizophrenia—not just a commodified style, skateboarding is a powerful experience of the body engaging with space; not just a dynamic kinesthetic and creative activity involving intense biomechanics, it is an identity; an alternative “lifeway” enhanced with attendant consumer goods.
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” (Hall 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.
I want to focus on skateboarding as a particular practice of contemporary “failures” and deviancies that continue in a longer genealogy of youthful wreckage of body, mind, and morals. As a practice (I hesitate to call it “sport”) skateboarding is a dynamic operation between the body, the architecture of the city, and the relation between the skateboarder’s imaginings of and responses to the possibilities available in the space of the city. To watch skateboarding is confusing for its lack of apparent rules, patterns or pre-given choreography. Skateboarding is improvisational, incoherent in its evaluation of risk and success, and results in frequent, sensational falls and fantastic injuries. Its immediate physical pleasures are not readily visible. However, skateboarding-as-signifier exceeds this risky practice and represents a dense imbrication of subcultural codes of style and performance, intense gender construction, and commercially successful packaging of “rebellion” within popular visual culture. The signifier of “skateboarding” is heavily overdetermined. With the massively popular Tony Hawk “American Wasteland” video game, MTV’s “Viva La Bam” reality show, ESPN’s “X Games”, and hip hop superstar Lil Wayne’s newly formed skate shoe company, skateboarding has become a common signifier and profitable commodity in global youth culture. The physical risks of skateboarding are translated into an even riskier symbol of social disorder that is then contained within structures of capitalist media production. In a hegemonic turn, the sheer profitability of skateboarding as a risky and deviant commodity suggests the energies of young people have been successfully contained within the productive identity of “consumer.” At the same time however, actual skateboarders on the streets confront intensifying techniques intended to restrain their risky behaviors. Defensive architectural modifications to curbs, benches and stairs are implemented to interdict the random energies of skateboarding and confirm the privilege of property against “illegal use.” Curfews, citywide skateboarding bans, and increasing police harassment under “anti-gang” policies in the U.S. have helped criminalize skateboarders themselves. The “consumer” and “criminal” categories of containment are predicated on the ideology of protection for the Child and its interests that are presumed to be synonymous with society’s future. This ideology of protection requires that the Child be available to the gaze of society so as to minimize the mutual danger and risk the Child and society pose to one another. The consumer/criminal typologies serve to make “youth” and its vulnerability to failure legible and visible.
Skateboarding strikingly manifests this double risk. When well managed as a commodity form, the criminalized body of the skateboarder embodies a highly desirable form of “youthful” cool. Through deviant practice, skateboarding authenticates signified risks that in turn produce a hefty profit margin—skateboards and equipment alone generate nearly 1.4 billion dollars in annual sales. This commodification of skateboarding-as-signifier threatens to overwhelm the real bodily experiences of the skaters themselves. This “double risk” might be usefully understood as a kind of schizophrenia—not just a commodified style, skateboarding is a powerful experience of the body engaging with space; not just a dynamic kinesthetic and creative activity involving intense biomechanics, it is an identity; an alternative “lifeway” enhanced with attendant consumer goods.
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