Abstract
Modern society’s fascination with the culture of childhood has a long and complex history. This is reflected not only in the changing nature of its social formations and state institutions but also in its own self-understanding, as children constitute the primary index through which a society registers its own meaning, vision, and politics. As many theorists of youth have reminded us, one of the distinctive elements of modernity was its acknowledgment of and commitment to the ideal that “[a] civilized society is one which struggles to make the world better for its children.”2 Understood by the nineteenth century as innocent beings in need of socialization, learning, and protection, children became an important modern symbol of both collective responsibility for and obligation to a future that would ensure their well-being and development as productive and worthy members of society. In this tradition, however contradictory, youth assumed the status of an important social investment, a political referent for adult responsibility, and a moral measure of how a society self-consciously undertakes to shape a more democratic future. Especially crucial in this discourse was not just the iconic figure of the child as the concrete embodiment of the promise and hope of the coming democratic social state but also the symbolic imagery of youth as a “guarantee that the present has the power to shape (even if in unpredictable ways) that future.”3
The market economy, source of all our freedoms, focus of all of our hopes, repository of our faith in progress, now threatens to crush us. It has annulled all alternatives to itself, thereby destroying one of the most fundamental of the human needs it purports to answer—the freedom to change, to find other forms of social and economic organization, to discover fresh ways of answering need, to imagine another future, the better world which this world could have been .… The cost of the leashed and diminished freedoms of the market, its celebrated “freedom of choice”, can now be seen as a consolation for our own incarceration.
—Jeremy Seabrook, Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives1
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Notes
Jeremy Seabrook, Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2004), p. 270.
Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing (London: Verso, 1993), p. vii.
Lawrence Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), p. 188.
The metaphor of the waste-disposal industry comes from the work of Zygmunt Bauman. The most recent work organized around this concept includes: Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (London: Polity Press, 2007)
I have taken up this theme in a number of books. See Henry A. Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994)
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Mitchell Dean, “Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5 (December 2004), p. 17.
My discussion of waste and disposability in this chapter draws mainly on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Mike Davis, Achille Mbembe, and Jeremy Seabrook. See Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1998).
Jeremy Seabrook, Children of Other Worlds: Exploitation in the Global Market (London: Pluto Press, 2001)
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15:1 (2003), pp. 11–40
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007)
Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: New Press, 2008).
Sam Binkley and Jo Littler, “Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encounter,” Cultural Studies 22:5 (September 2008).
As Lizabeth Cohen has brilliantly argued, the relationship between citizen and consumer over the course of the twentieth century defies any simple distinction and has been subject to ever-shifting categories. See Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003).
Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Philosophyin a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 94.
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Susan Searls Giroux, “Generation Kill: Nietzschean Meditations on the University, War, Youth, and Guns,” Works and Days 51/52:1 and 2 (2008), p. 1.
Jeremy Gilbert, “Against the Commodification of Everything: Anti-Consumerist Cultural Studies in the Age of Ecological Crisis,” Cultural Studies 22:5 (September 2008), p. 53.
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 41.
For an excellent analysis of the control of corporate power on the media, see Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of the Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
Colin Campbell, “I Shop Therefore I Know That I Am: The Metaphysical Basis of Modern Consumerism,” in Elusive Consumption, ed. Karin M. Ekstrom and Henene Brembeck (New York: Berg, 2004), p. 42.
For an excellent history analyzing the politics of mass consumption in postwar America, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic. Foran equally impressive history of the commodification of childhood in the clothing industry, see Daniel Thomas Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
Jackson Lears, A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
Chris Rojek, “The Consumerist Syndrome in Contemporary Society: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,” Journal of Consumer Culture 4:3 (2004), p. 292.
Jason Pine, “Economy of Speed,” Public Culture 52 (Spring 2007), p. 358.
For two recent forays into this issue, see Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 2008).
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1966).
I have taken up this issue in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
For a detailed treatment of liquid modernity, see Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity Press, 2000).
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Bodies for Sale—Whole or In Parts,” Body & Society 7:2-3 (2001), p. 2.
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964)
George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972)
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991)
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994)
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995)
Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000).
Some of the books that address the commercialization of young people while drawing on the theoretical legacy of now-classic theories of reification, consumption, and simulacra include: Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen, Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment-Advertising (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001)
Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe, Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (Boulder: Westview, 1997)
Benjamin R. Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007)
Deron Boyles, The Corporate Assault on Youth (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), pp. 25–26.
See Josh Golin, “Nation’s Strongest School Commercialism Bill Advances Out of Committee,” Common Dreams News Center (August 1, 2007). Online: http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/newsprint.cgi?file=/news2007/0801-06.htm. Juliet Schor argues that total advertising and marketing expenditures directed at children in 2004 reached $15 billion. See Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy (New York: Scribner, 2005), p. 21.
Juliet Schor, “When Childhood Gets Commercialized Can Childhood Be Protected,” in Regulation, Awareness, Empowerment: Young People and Harmful Media Content in the Digital Age, ed. Ulla Carlsson (Sweden: Nordicom, 2006), pp. 114–115.
Kiku Adatto, “Selling Out Childhood,” Hedgehog Review 5:2 (Summer 2003), p. 40.
While the commodity form pervaded the social as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, it not only has been normalized and extended into all aspects of social life in the latter half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century but also has legitimated a neoliberal politics of financialization that is far more ruthless in its destruction of the social and democracy than at any other time in the American past. On the history of consumption and commodification, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic; and Lears, A Cultural History of Advertising in America. On neoliberalism and the politics of financialization, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston, eds., Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader (London: Pluto Press, 2005)
Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2005)
Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)
Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)
Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008).
Susan Linn, Consuming Kids (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), p. 8.
Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger, “Adrift: Schools in a Total Marketing Environment,” Tenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2006–2007 (Tempe: Arizona State University, 2007), pp. 6–7.
Nick Turse, How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), p. 100.
Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil (London: Polity Press, 2005), p. 49.
Douglas Kellner, Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and the School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008), p. 157.
Victoria Rideout, Donald F. Roberts, and Ulla G. Foehr, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8–18 Year-Olds (Washington, DC: Kaiser Family Foundation, March 2005), p. 4.
Jeff Chester and Kathryn Montgomery, Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children in the Digital Age (Berkeley: Media Studies Group; Washington, DC: Center for Digital Democracy, 2007), p. 13. Online: http://digitalads.org/documents/digiMarketingFull.pdf.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “The Role of Media in Childhood Obesity,” (Menlo Park, CA: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, February 2004), p. 1.
For an excellent resource on youth activism, see Adam Fletcher, Washington Youth Voice Handbook: The What, Who, Why, Where, When and How Youth Voice Happens (Olympia, WA: CommonAction, 2007).
Sut Jhally’s excellent book The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Culture, Media, and Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2006).
Juliet B. Schor, “The Commodification of Childhood: Tales from the Advertising Front Lines,” Hedgehog Review 5:2 (Summer 2003), pp. 9–10.
A number of psychologists, especially Allen D. Kanner, have publicly criticized this practice by child psychologists. In fact, Kanner and some of his colleagues raised the issue in a letter to the American Psychological Association. See Miriam H. Zoll, “Psychologists Challenge Ethics of Marketing to Children,” American News Service (April 5, 2000). Online: http://www.mediachannel.org/originals/kidsell.shtml. See also Allen D. Kanner, “The Corporatized Child,” California Psychologist 39:1 (January/February 2006), pp. 1–2
Allen D. Kanner, “Globalization and the Commercialization of Childhood,” Tikkun 20:5 (September/October, 2005), pp. 49–5
I am borrowing here from Michel Foucault’s notion of pastoral power. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1997), p. 225.
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 87.
Carly Stasko and Trevor Norris, “Packaging Youth and Selling Tomorrow,” in The Corporate Assault on Youth, ed. Deron Boyles (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 130.
The most notable example of this position is Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1994).
Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999)
Henry Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Joseph E. Davis, “The Commodification of Self,” Hedgehog Review 5:2 (Summer 2003), p. 41.
On the matter of schools being modeled after businesses, see Kenneth Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
Robin Goodman and Kenneth Saltman, Strange Love: Or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002)
Alex Molnar, School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity (New York: Routledge, 2005)
This argument is developed in Trevor Hogan, “The Space of Poverty: Zygmunt Bauman ‘After’ Jeremy Seabrook,” Thesis Eleven 70 (August 2002), pp. 72–87.
Susan Gal, “Language, Gender, and Power: An Anthropological Review,” in Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, ed. Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 178.
Steven Heller, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State (New York: Phaidon Press, 2008).
Sheldon Wolin, Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 12–13.
Juliet Schor, “Tackling Turbo Consumption: An Interview with Juliet Schor,” Soundings 34 (November 2006), p. 51.
I have taken up this issue in a number of works; see especially Henry A. Giroux, Against the New Authoritarianism: Politics After Abu Ghraib (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2005)
Jacques Derrida, “Intellectual Courage: An Interview,” trans. Peter Krapp, in Culture Machine 2 (2000), p. 9.
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© 2009 Henry A. Giroux
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Giroux, H.A. (2009). Born to Consume: Youth and the Pedagogy of Commodification. In: Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100565_2
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