ABSTRACT
In the previous two chapters, we focused on the spatial arrangements and configurations of symbolic domination at the local level of the school and neighbourhood. In this chapter, we move towards a consideration of the symbolic role of the highly individualized liberal citizen, and his/ her perceived place within the nation. In particular, we are interested in exploring how individualization, social class relations and national scripts come together in the late-modern global city and are drawn upon as symbolic references by low-income youth in their own understandings of state legitimacy. We examine these questions through two lenses: the first draws upon Goffman’s traditional youth subcultural concept, ‘the front’, and seeks to re-contextualize its meaning for the twenty-first-century city. The second borrows from critiques of the liberal state in political theory as a means for revealing some of the symbolic meanings associated with the commonly used, but highly misapprehended term, ‘citizenship’. Although apparently disparate in theoretical orientation and meaning, we suggest here that both ‘the front’, a cultural and class performance, and ‘citizenship’, as a symbolic and classifying reference of the nation, are used as cultural strategies by young people to apprehend their own and others’ place in local subcultures and the national imaginary. We begin by asking how young people have been transformed, both in their daily lives and in the broader perception of national imaginaries, by social changes associated with individualization practices operating at the edge of the neo-liberal city. This is not necessarily the form of individualization described by Beck (1992) and Giddens (1991), which is sometimes seen as an agentic means of mobility, reflexivity and freedom from traditions by which liberal citizens engage with ‘do it yourself ’ or ‘can do’ biographies, or are under pressure to live out new ways of life that deviate substantially from previous traditions. Rather, the pressure
178
to become ‘the best one can be’ is necessarily contorted and reconfigured when applied to the lives of low-income youth who do not see within their horizons the potential for agency, mobility and middle-class possibilities seen to be available to some of their peers. It is here that we draw upon Goffman’s (1959) seminal notion of ‘the front’, traditionally conceptualized as young people’s projection of collective experience and marginalization. Here, while retaining some of its original conceptual force, we re-position ‘the front’ as a social and cultural practice which has embedded elements of individualization and risk into its own cultural narrative and set of positional rules as it is performed in the present. In the contemporary global city, we argue that the ‘front’ is used by low-income youth as a recuperative strategy which provides a platform for expressing and bolstering sometimes quite fierce identity claims about young people’s value and legitimacy in urban contexts where they often feel devalued. Rather than reinforcing their position within subcultural groups, then, we see ‘the front’ as a medium and form of governance for expressing working-class distinctions intended to assert young people’s individual value in a political moment and risk society where the ‘do it yourself ’, ‘can do’ culture or the culture of self-perfection carry powerful symbolic and cultural weight (Rose, 1999). At the same time, contemporary social changes simultaneously appear to be transforming the very meaning(s) of what it is to be young in relation to the state and to new patterns of social class retrenchment in urban centres. For example, young people are often characterized, on the one hand, as ‘international’, ‘global’, hybrid and mobile (see Rizvi, 2005), and, on the other, as fundamentally disenfranchised from democratic politics (Mitchell, 2003; Institute for Public Policy Research, 2006). What lies behind these recent shifts in our conceptualizations of young people? In what ways are intensified patterns of social stratification under the dynamics of global neo-liberalism re-contextualizing young people’s engagement with concepts of ‘citizenship’, nation and state membership at local scales of the school and neighbourhood life? Finally, how do young people themselves narrate their own and others’ ‘citizenship’? Here we attempt to answer these questions by exploring what these converging temporal and conceptual shifts in the category youth, urbanization and the citizen might mean for young people’s classification struggles within the radically transformed fringe of the late-modern Canadian city. Our comparative analysis of youth cultures shows that the prevailing and accelerating emphasis on individualism and meritocracy has served to intensify the production of what Goffman identified in the 1950s as ‘the front’, particularly as a generalized response to social conflicts at the level of race, class, gender and nation as encountered within local neighbourhoods. Our approach concentrates upon how elements of
youth subcultural and post-subcultural activity interact with the social structures of late-modern Canadian cities to generate new conceptions of belonging and citizenship amongst young people. This intersection between structure and youth cultural activity belies the simple injunction that young people should become more ‘civically engaged’, a claim which locates the problems of democratic disengagement as principally within young people themselves. By contrast, we suggest that strategic efforts to create more inclusive political environments must begin with a socio-cultural analysis of young people’s national imaginaries of belonging and the state, alongside their classification struggles. Drawing upon the work of Wendy Brown (2005, 2006) and others (see Arendt, 1968), our primary argument rests upon the idea that an enduring problem with a normative, liberal conception of citizenship is its assertion of an abstract notion of individualized belonging that does little to understand or engage the highly variegated ways that such concepts are conceptualized by low-income young people living in globalizing urban centres. We therefore concentrate on how young people conceptualize not only class and race (see Chapters 4, 5 and 6), but also national scripts and citizenship as symbolic referents in their ‘classification struggles’ (Bourdieu, 1984). As demonstrated in previous chapters, attempts to classify can be understood as deeply ambivalent cultural processes of struggle through which young people mark their own and other bodies as, for example, ‘strange’, ‘foreign’ or ‘acceptable’. This leads us towards some understanding of young people’s conceptions of the state and citizen as a ritualized component of cultural strategies which are responding to wider memories of home and nation and micro-nationalisms.1 Against this background, we now move forward to explore: (1) the manifestations of the new individualized ‘front’, as expressed in relation to symbolic culture, nation and micro-nationalisms at the level of youth cultural activity; and (2) conceptions of citizenship as they are expressed, through language and through visual symbol, in the lives of our young participants in Tower Hill and Beacon Park.
