The Question(s) of Youth, of what to do with them, of how to school them, or police them, or regulate them, or house them, or employ them, or prevent them from becoming involved in any number of Risky (sexual, eating, drug (ab)using or peer cultural) practices are questions which have a substantial historical aspect. In the Liberal Democracies at the end of the millennium the Crisis of Youth (at-Risk) is a key marker in theoretical, political and popular debates about Youth. This thesis explores the 'conditions of possibility' which enable discourses of Youth at-Risk to function as true (Henriques et al 1984). I argue that the truth of Youth at-Risk rehearses, in part, the historical truths of Youth as Delinquent, Deviant and Disadvantaged. I will also argue that a historically novel aspect of the truth of Youth at-Risk is that, potentially, every behaviour, every practice, every group of Youth can be constructed in terms of Risk.
This thesis is not about the practices, behaviours and dispositions of young people. Rather, my concern is with the ways in which institutionally structured processes of expert knowledge production construct the truths of Youth (at-Risk). The thesis is concerned with the processes by which these largely autonomous systems of expert knowledge production are constitutive of both the 'institutional reflexivity' which characterises contemporary settings, and the forms of identity which emerge in these settings (Giddens 1994 c). I am also concerned with the ways in which these systems of expertise mobilise categories of Risk in diverse attempts to regulate the behaviours and dispositions of certain populations of young people under the conditions of 'reflexive modernization' (Beck, Giddens & Lash 1994).
The thesis argues for a productive convergence between theories of reflexive modernization and governmentality. This convergence enables Youth at-Risk to be examined at two (interconnected) levels. In the first instance Risk is understood as constituting a metanarrative in an Age of Manufactured Uncertainty. In the second instance the identification of Risk factors and populations at-Risk will be understood as techniques mobilised in diverse attempts to 'make up' rational, choice making, autonomous, responsible citizens within (Neo)Liberal projects of government (Rose 1996).
Foucault's (1991) theory of governmentality foregrounds the practices and relations implicated in the processes whereby 'human beings are made into subjects' (Foucault 1983). Governmentality is a useful and strategic analytic for understanding the diverse attempts by various experts and centres of expertise to regulate young people's identity through the construction of populations of Youth at-Risk.
Processes of reflexive modernization are marked by the emergence of a degree of collective awareness that our contemporary conditions of existence are characterised by the thoroughgoing penetration of the social and the natural by reflexive human knowledge. Such a situation leads, not to a position in 'which collectively we are the masters [sic] of our destiny'; but rather to a series of settings in which we are confronted with the possibility that, as a 'consequence of our own doings', the future becomes 'very threatening' (Beck, Giddens & Lash 1994).
In problematising the truth of Youth at-Risk this thesis will also engage with various problematisations of Left (critical) intellectual and political practices in domains which take Youth as their object. This thesis is explicitly located in the space of 'critical' (Educational) scholarship in Anglo settings which is structured, historically, by the 'European Marxist social philosophy' of the Frankfurt School and Gramscian (British) Cultural Studies, and French and Italian Feminism and Post (Structuralism and Modernism) (Popkewitz and Brennan 1997). The thesis argues that in order to problematise the truth of Youth at-Risk it is necessary, also, to problematise the processes of truth production mobilised from the Left in an engagement with the material and discursive realities which enable Youth at-Risk to function as a truth. Examining the truth of Youth at-Risk in the frameworks enabled by a convergence of theories of reflexive modernization and governmentality is a contribution to the processes of rethinking the intellectual and political positions which the Left might mobilise at the end of the millennium, when, as Beck (1994 ) argues, 'uncertainty returns'. I will argue that Left intellectual and political practice has no choice but to be open to the uncertain nature of truth telling which characterises processes of reflexive modernization. The tensions generated within these processes are not resolvable. Nor should the 'return of uncertainty' be seen as immobilising in the context of political and intellectual practice.
The thesis argues that theories of reflexive modernization and governmentality highlight the dangers of intellectual and political positions which invest heavily in 'modernity's war on ambivalence' (Bauman 1990 b). In settings where the practices and activities of expertise have so thoroughly penetrated the natural and the social, where these processes of colonisation have resulted in the 'return of uncertainty', then the practices and activities of expertise promise, paradoxically, to 'exterminate ambivalence' by telling the truths of Youth at-Risk (Bauman 1990 b). This thesis argues that in an Age of Manufactured Uncertainty the mobilisation of rationally grounded Risk discourses in attempts to regulate Youth emerges as a paradoxical, and dangerous, Quest for Certainty (Bauman 1990 a).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216919 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Kelly, Peter, pkelly@deakin.edu.au |
| Publisher | Deakin University. Bowater School of Management and Marketing |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.deakin.edu.au/disclaimer.html), Copyright Peter Kelly |
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