ABSTRACT
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. Youth's complex relationship with popular culture as a lived and expressive domain is menacing because the uses of culture cannot be policed completely. In some instances, those uses are evidence of something greater than individual delinquency: crisis. Style as an expression of youth culture becomes one way to identify affiliations with "subcultures" and, by implication, with crime. Youth culture contains all the appeal of that contentious time outside the adult as well as the pleasurable surveillance of "photogenic confrontations." Cohen's concept of moral panic, which primarily indicates the political purchase of public events, demonstrates similar inadequacies. Colin Mercer makes similar attempts to grasp the complexity of the appeal of popular culture by theorizing pleasure. Zinsmeister's article is premised upon the existence of a taken-for-granted crisis of youth. It presents additional supporting evidence for the claim that the young require increasing guidance.
