We're Talented and Bright, We're Lonely and Uptight: Youth Political (Dis)Engagement in Canada
by
Peter Eirikson
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Political Science)
Acadia University Fall Convocation 2008
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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada This thesis by Peter Bromiley Eirik Eirikson was defended successfully in an oral examination on August 20, 2008.
The examining committee for the thesis was:
Dr. Leigh Whaley, Chair
Dr. Alexandra Dobrowolsky, External Reader
Dr. Geoffrey Whitehall, Internal Reader
Dr. Andrew Biro, Supervisor
Dr. Malcolm Grieve, Head/Director
This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (Political Science). Abstract
This project examines the nature of youth political (dis)engagement in Canada. Political engagement is considered in traditional (voting and party membership) and non-traditional forms (advocacy, protest, and cultural politics). The work of Herbert Marcuse, Frederic Jameson, and Yochai Benkler is used to ground youth in the context of the social space of networked late capitalism. Consideration is also given to the role of place and region in the construction of individual and collective identity, and how this bears on political engagement. Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: CANADIAN YOUTH AND POLITICAL (DIS)ENGAGEMENT 7 TRADITIONAL POLITICAL PARTICIPATION 9 SOCIETY, CULTURAL POLITICS, AND NON-TRADITIONAL POLITICAL PARTICIPATION 17 YOUTH AND TRADITIONAL VS. NON-TRADITIONAL PARTICIPATION 21 YOUTH 25 CHAPTER 2: NETWORKED LATE CAPITALISM 33 FROM MARKET CAPITALISM TO THE NETWORKED INFORMATION SOCIETY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE 35 Herbert Marcuse and Advanced Industrial Society. 37 Frederic Jameson and Late Capitalism 48 Yochai Benkler and the Networked Information Economy 59 IMMANENT CRITIQUE 66 CULTURE AND CRITIQUE 71 CHAPTER 3: SPACE AND IDENTITY 76 CULTURE AND SUBJECT-HOOD IN NETWORKED LATE CAPITALISM 77 PLACE, REGION AND IDENTITY 86 Music, SPACE, AND IDENTITY 90 Broken Social Scene 93 Region, Place and Canadian Indie Music 96 SPACE AND COGNITIVE MAPPING: ORIENTING OURSELVES 101 CONCLUSION: YOUTH, POLITICS, AND SPACE 110 WORKS CITED 116
List of Tables Table 1: Ratio of Political Party to Interest Group Membership 24
List of Figures Figure 1: Satisfaction with Democracy and Federal Elections, and Interest in Politics by Age Cohort 14
IV Introduction
We're talented and bright, We're lonely and uptight. - Weakerthans, ''Watermark"
This project examines the nature of youth political (dis)engagement in
Canada.2 Traditional forms of political engagement, such as voting and being a member of a political party, are activities that today's Canadian youth are less likely to take part in than before. This thesis will argue that because youth have come of age in our current socio-cultural moment - networked late capitalism - their relationship to, and engagement with the political is different than for earlier generations, that came of age during earlier socio-cultural configurations which reflected earlier iterations of capitalism.
Specifically, networked late capitalism has two fundamental characteristics which play a role in structuring youth's political engagement. First, the total commodification of culture under late capitalism, which Fredric Jameson says can also be understood as "a prodigious expansion of culture through the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life — from economic value and state power to practices and the very structure of the psyche itself- can be said to have become
' The Weakerthans, "Watermark," Left and Leaving, 2000, CD. 2 This thesis is concerned with political participation with reference to the spatial scale of Canada. It speaks to political participation and engagement primarily in the context of politics centered around the geographical-political entity of Canada as a state.
1 'cultural.'" And second, with the arrival of the personal computer the Internet, the production and exchange of information, knowledge, and culture has become more transparent, malleable, and decentralized in that, with the help of new technologies, it has become possible for more people to become producers of cultural products, and easier for people to share these products.
Three theorists - Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson, and Yochai Benkler - were selected in order to develop an account of these characteristics of networked late capitalism. This choice creates tension within the project, but it is a tension that arguably reflects a further reality of our socio-cultural moment: the dynamic possibilities that networked capitalism holds for human freedom, weighed down by the reality of the restrictive, often oppressive reality of capitalist society. On the one hand this thesis makes use of two theorists (Marcuse and Jameson), who both tend to privilege structure over agency, and give critiques of capitalism. And on the other, there is Benkler, who, coming from the liberal, rather than Marxist tradition, tends to give more weight to agency, and emphasizes the possibilities that networked capitalism holds. The tension between these two theoretical traditions is not enough to derail the project; a coherent argument concerning our socio-cultural moment, and youth's relationship to it, emerges notwithstanding.
A decline in political participation amongst youth has garnered considerable attention, and given rise to concerns about the health of our representative
3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (USA: Duke University Press, 1991), 48. 4 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2006), 1-2.
2 democracy.5 Commonly cited causes for this drop in political engagement include a lack of interest in and knowledge about politics, and lack of a sense of duty to participate.6 However, these are only proximate causes; they do not explain broader social, cultural, and generational trends and characteristics which explain the decline in voting and party membership amongst youth. Further, they are at odds with research which indicates that youth have a strong sense of national identity; that is
Canadian youth identify with, or feel connected to Canada as a geographic political region.7 This thesis will look beyond these proximate causes, and situate youth in their socio-cultural moment in order to clarify the nature of youth political
(dis)engagement in Canada.
The first chapter of this project introduces the issue of youth and political
engagement with respect to forms of both traditional (voting, party membership) and non-traditional (advocacy, protest, boycotts, cultural expression) political engagement
in Canada, and the relative inclination of youth to engage in the latter over the former.
We will see the extent to which this is the case, and explore some generational
characteristics that might account for it. Our task for the remainder of the project is to
explore the underlying reasons for the nature of youth political (dis)engagement - to
understand not just generational characteristics, but the social, cultural, and historical
context of today's youth. In discussing non-traditional participation, the author has
chosen to focus on discussion related to the relationship and culture and politics,
5 See for instance, Andre Blais, et al, "Missing the Message: Young Adults and Election Issues," Electoral Insight (January 2005) http://www.elections.ca/eca/eirn/article_search/article.asp?id=122&lang=e&frmPageSize=20&text only=false. 6 Brenda O'Neill, Indifferent or Just Different? The Political and Civic Engagement of Young People in Canada, (Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Networks, 2007), 24. 7 Jason Bristow, The Next West Generation: Young Adults, Identity and Democracy, (Calgary: Canada West Foundation, 2008), 10.
3 rather than on the area of advocacy and social movement politics. This choice underscores one of the central contentions of the thesis - that an examination of socio-cultural context, rather than specific manifestations of overtly political action, is important to understanding the nature of youth political (dis)engagement.
The final two chapters of the project, then, seek to theorize this reality of youth (dis)engagement in a discussion of the developing nature of society and culture through the latter half of the twentieth century, to today. This discussion is framed around economic changes that have seen advanced industrial capitalism give rise to the advanced information economy, or late capitalism, which is now in turn developing into a networked information society. This transition will be used as a basis for understanding shifting generational political attitudes and behaviours, which are a reflection of the current socio-cultural moment of today's youth.
This shift has brought important changes in the possibilities for communication, and cultural production and exchange. The development of the
Internet, most notably, has emerged as a new tool that can enhance social connectedness and cultural exchange, and play a role in the development of individual and cultural narrative.
There is a common objection to the contention that the Internet can serve as means to further such social connection (and hence cultural development). According to such objections, the Internet actually leads to further social fragmentation and isolation, as we privilege online interaction over face-to-face social connections.8
However, the evidence does not support this conclusion. According to Benkler, it seems the reverse occurs; people use the Internet to reinforce and preserve existing
8 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 356.
4 social connections, as well as using the Internet to expand their social networks and make new connections.9 Empirical research10 challenges the idea that the Internet that will lead to fragmentation of society into an array of discrete monadic individuals; the
Internet has in fact represented a vast improvement over other forms of mass communication - television and telephone, for instance - in this regard. The Internet allows for "a thickening of existing social relations with friends, family and neighbours, particularly with those who were not easily reachable in the pre-Internet- mediated environment," as well as ushering in the development of loose and fluid, but nevertheless meaningful, social networks.11 As we will see, the Internet thus serves as a means through which we can orient ourselves in the space of global, multi-national capital, and reinforce social connections.
We will also situate Canadian youth within their socio-historical context through a discussion of their identification with space and location, at a variety of scales. This will provide an additional dimension to our discussion of the situation of the subject in the global space of late capital, as well as ground our relation to space at the local and regional level. Music plays a key part in forming this connection to location, especially amongst youth. It will be argued that these spatial levels (global capital versus the regional/local) can be bridged in part by the nature of the emergent networked society. Finally, we will conclude by showing how these factors weigh upon youth political (dis)engagement in Canada, both in its traditional and non- traditional manifestations.
9 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks), Ch. 10. 10 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 363-366. 11 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks), 357.
5 Through these discussions, the author hopes to bring some clarity to the generational context and characteristics that shape the relationship of youth to the political in Canada. The hope is that the reader will emerge with an enhanced appreciation for the socio-cultural space of Canadian youth in the early twenty-first century, and thus a stronger understanding for the political (dis)engagement of youth.
6 Chapter 1: Canadian Youth and Political (Dis)Engagement
Children wake up, Hold your mistake up, Before they turn the summer into dust. -Arcade Fire, "Wake Up"
The nature of youth political engagement in Canada is changing. Voter turnout is declining, and this is nowhere more evident than when we look at turnout amongst youth. The decline in youth turnout in Canada is mirrored by similar declines in other developed democracies. Even countries such as Finland and
Norway, with traditionally high voter turnouts, are being affected, although the greatest drops have been seen in the U.K., the U.S., and Canada.13 The fall in voter turnout - one of the most important acts of traditional democratic political participation - is alarming, especially as this tendency is exhibited by youth, who bear the burden of responsibility for the future of democracy.
As we explore the subject of youth political engagement we will see that two of the most important indicators of traditional political participation in a representative democracy - voter turnout and party membership - are both lower among Canadian youth than other age groups. In fact, age is the most important
12 The Arcade Fire, "Wake Up," Funeral, 2004, CD. 13 Henry Milner, "Are Young Canadians Becoming Political Dropouts?: A Comparative Study," (IRPP Choices 11. no. 3), 3.
7 predictor of levels of political interest and political knowledge, both of which are correlated with political participation.14 (Though this correlation between knowledge, interest, and participation in politics exists, it is not clear in which direction causality moves in the relationship.15)
Before moving into a discussion of the nature of youth political apathy, we will attempt to give some definition to the age cohort that we distinguish as youth. It must be understood that the term 'generation' will imply some degree of looseness; we are not intending to hedge in a certain definite age cohort down to the year of birth, but rather to give an outline based on a range of birth years that will account for some broad shared cultural and social experiences. In general we will be referring to youth as those born after 1979, though at times, depending in part on the survey or data cited in the course of this chapter, that date might vary slightly.
This generation is variously referred to as Generation Y, the 'echo boomers,'
Millennial, or the Internet Generation (NetGen)16. All of these names speak to certain aspects of the shared cultural and social environment and events of the generation: they are the younger siblings, or in some cases children of Generation X; the children of boomers, the largest generation in Canadian history (echo boomers themselves constituting the second largest);17 and the cohort which is coming of age
l40'Neill, Indifferent or Just Different, 13. 15 Mary Pat MacKinnon, Sonia Pitre and Judy Watling, Lost in Translation: (Mis)Understanding Youth Engagement: Synthesis Report, (Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Networks, 2007), 10. 16 MacKinnon, Pitre, Watling, Lost in Translation, 5-8. 17 According to the 2006 Canadian Census nearly one third of all Canadians are Baby Boomers. Statistics Canada defines baby boomers as those born between 1946 and 1965. The Echo Boomers, which Statistics Canada defines as those born between 1975 and 1995, represented nearly as large a portion of the Canadian population (27.5%) as the Baby Boomers. These two cohorts represent the two largest Canadian generations. N.A., "Baby Boomers Remain the Largest Generation," 2006 Census: Analysis Series. (http://www 12.statcan.ca/english/census06/analysis/agesex/NatlPortrait8.cfm)
8 with the new millennium and the Internet. It is to this generation that we are referring when we use the label 'youth.'
Traditional Political Participation
Elections Canada, the Institute for Research on Public Policy, and Canadian
Policy Research Networks have all recently devoted a great deal of attention to the issue of youth political participation. Elections Canada, for the most part, has focused on what we will call traditional participation, specifically voter turnout. This issue relates directly to the mandate of Elections Canada, and declining turnout amongst youth over the last several federal elections is an issue of concern for this body. And it should be, as "tracking non-voters across the three latest [sic] Canadian general elections (1993, 1997 and 2000) reveals that not voting increased only among those born after 1970, and by a significant 14 points."18 This trend has continued, with the
2004 election seeing turnout amongst voters 18-29 sitting 15 points lower than for turnout amongst those over 30.19
Canadian youth are also less likely to be involved with political parties than older generations. In a study by William Cross and Lisa Young, results showed that only 3 percent of party members are under 25, and the average age of party
Brenda O'Neill, "Examining Declining Electoral Turnout Among Canada's Youth," Electoral Insight (July 2003) http://www.elections.ca/eca/eim/article_search/article.asp?id=49&lang=e&frmPageSize= 20&textonly=false. 19 A. Blais et al., "Missing the Message: Young Adults and the Election Issues," Electoral Insight (January 2005) http://www.elections.ca/eca/eim/article_search/article.asp?id=122&lang=e&frmPageSiz e=20&textonly=false.
9 membership-holders is 59. Further, according to data gathered by the Institute for
Public Policy Research only 2 percent of those between the ages of 18-27 have ever been a member of a political party, compared with 9 percent of those 28-37, 15 percent of those 38-47, and 26 percent of those 48-57. ' The wording of the question asks respondents whether they have ever been a member of a political party, so it is not surprising that older respondents are more likely to have at some point held a party membership. Older citizens have had longer to take the opportunity to join a party.
When respondents who had never been a member of a political party were asked if they had ever considered membership, young respondents were more likely to say that that they had not: 97 percent of 18-27 year-olds in this group gave this response, while only 85 percent of 48-57 year-olds said the same.22 Again though, older generations have had longer to consider membership in a political party, and are thus more likely to have given thought to joining a party.
There is an indication, though, that these phenomena cannot be accounted for solely on the basis of the extra time that older generations have had to join, or consider joining, a political party. A study by Perlin, Sutherland and Desjardins from
1988, which reviewed the status given to youth in political parties found that there were concerns about the undue influence of youth at the 1983 Conservative and 1984
William Cross and Lisa Young, "Examining the Contours of Youth Participation in Political Parties," http://www.ucalgary.ca/~ptyyouth/. 21 Brenda O'Neill, "Generational Patterns in the Political Behaviour of Canadians," (IRPP Policy Matters Oct. 2001, vol. 2, no. 5), 13. 22 O'Neill, Generational Patterns, 14.
10 Liberal leadership conventions. This influence was a result of the overrepresentation of youth at the conventions, an issue with which parties are not concerned today.
Youth then, are very disinclined to engage in the two behaviours, voting and holding party membership, which reflect traditional modes of political participation in
Canada. In "Examining Declining Electoral Turnout Among Canada's Youth,"
Brenda O'Neill distinguishes between two types of forces that can account for differences in political attitudes and behaviours: generational effects and life-cycle effects. Generational effects refer to those shared experiences of a given age cohort during years crucial to the formation of political attitudes which may permanently shape the political attitudes and behaviours of that group. A good example of this, with several historical instances to which we can refer to in Canadian history, is the occurrence of a war, which can play a large role in influencing the formation of political attitudes.
Life-cycle effects, on the other hand, refer to changes in political behaviours and attitudes that take place normally over a life-time, and are somewhat consistent from generation to generation. For instance, people tend to take a greater interest in politics in mid and late life.24 This particular life-cycle effect is typically accounted for in two ways: people come to realize or understand the importance of political decisions for their own well being, and they develop and display a sense of responsibility for their community. 5
Lisa Young and William Cross, "A Group Apart: Young Party Members in Canada," Charting the Course for Youth Civic and Political Participation, (Ottawa: CPRN, 2007), 5. 24 O'Neill, Indifferent or Just Different, 8. 25 Brenda O'Neill, "Examining Declining Electoral Turnout."
11 O'Neill attempts to use this distinction to determine whether the current low in youth voter turnout is the result of a generational or life-cycle effect. Examining data from surveys conducted by the Institute for Research on Public Policy in 1990 and 2000, as well as data from the 1997 federal election, she concludes that declining turnout is the result of both generational and life-cycle effects. However, generational effects are outpacing life-cycle effects in such a way that voter turnout is not likely to return to the levels it had achieved in the late 1980s. Canada has seen a very noticeable drop in voter turnout since the 1988 election, during which 75.3 percent of those included on the list of electors voted. By the June 2004 election, this had fallen to a low of 60.9 percent, rebounding only slightly to 64.7 percent in the January 2006 election.
Turnout is not likely to rebound because today's youth are even less likely to vote than previous generations when they were youth. Youth are typically among the least engaged in terms of traditional means of political participation, and the current generation of youth display this tendency to a greater degree than earlier generations did when they were youth. According to the expected life-cycle effect, generations born after 1979 should begin to vote in greater numbers once they draw closer to their thirties. However, these generations are less likely to vote now, as youth, than previous generations, meaning that in order to reach the voting levels that older generations have grown into once they moved into their thirties, these younger generations will have even more ground to make up than did previous generations.
' Elections Canada, "Voter Turnout at Federal Elections and Referendums, 1867-2006," http://www. elections. ca/content.asp?section=pas&document=turnout&lang=e&textonly=false.
12 It is clear that Canadian youth are less traditionally politically active then older generations. But why? The answer is not altogether clear, but what there is by way of an answer is somewhat surprising. This lack of participation is not a result of cynicism surrounding politics. Youth are no more cynical about politics than older generations in Canada. In fact, youth are more optimistic about and satisfied with democracy in Canada. When asked, "On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied or not satisfied at all with the way democracy works in
Canada?", 82 percent of 18-27 year-olds responded that they were very or fairly satisfied with democracy in Canada, in contrast to 75 percent of those 28-37, 74 percent of those 38-47, 70 percent of those 48-57, and 65 percent of those over 57.
Similar results obtain for satisfaction regarding federal elections; again, youth identify themselves as the most satisfied with the electoral process (See Figure l).27
Youth display other attitudes which seem at odds with their political apathy as well: they hold more positive opinions of the federal government than older age groups and are less likely to see money as a factor in according some individuals undue political advantage.
27 O'Neill, "Generational Patterns," 16. 28 O'Neill, "Generational Patterns," 33.
13 Figure 1: Satisfaction with Democracy and Federal Elections, and Interest in Politics by Age Cohort
18-27 28-37 38-47 48-57 Over 57 Age
Given the seeming satisfaction of youth with democracy and politics in
Canada, their lack of participation is surprising. But it does allow us to draw an important conclusion; when youth do not vote, it is very likely not a deliberate act of political protest. If it were, youth would likely display greater cynicism than the more heavily traditionally engaged older generations of Canadians. When youth do abstain from voting, it more likely a matter of lack of political knowledge and interest than it is of cynicism. In the 2000IRPP survey, only 41 percent of Canadians ages 18-27 indicate an interest in politics. This figure jumps to 59 percent for those aged 28-37, and continues to increase with age. Figure 1 displays nicely this contrast between satisfaction with and interest in politics among youth; while youth are reportedly the most satisfied with democracy and federal elections in Canada, they are by a significant margin the least interested in politics.
Milner, "Political Dropouts," 5. O'Neill, Examining Declining Electoral Turnout.
14 This is further demonstrated by data taken from the 2004 Canadian Election
Survey, which shows that young people are less likely to be able to identify key political actors such as the Prime Minster and Minister of Finance, and to associate political parties with their policies and platforms. And on a scale of 0 to 10, young
Canadians rated their interest in politics as only a 4.5, compared with a 7.5 for those in their sixties and older.31 Lack of interest in and education about electoral politics would certainly seem to be one reason for the decline in traditional participation amongst youth. Young Canadians are the most optimistic about democracy and our political system, but this may simply reflect a lack of familiarity.
Another possible reason for youth apathy is the sense of duty that Canadian youth feel towards voting, or rather their lack of this sense of duty. An article published by the authors of the 2004 Canadian Election Study in The Globe and Mail discusses this issue (as well as others related to youth engagement). Seventy-five percent of respondents to a survey felt that it was the duty of every citizen to vote in federal elections, and 32 percent admitted they would feel guilty if they did not.
However, only 55 percent of young Canadians share this sense of duty, and only 18 percent said that not voting in federal elections would make them feel guilty.32 The lack of a sense of duty is probably connected to the issue of interest in politics. If youth are less interested in politics, it is not hard to understand their lack of a sense of duty to engage. Clearly these attitudes bear upon youth participation in politics.
'' Andre Blais, et al, "Missing the Message: Young Adults and Election Issues," Electoral Insight (January 2005) http://www.elections.ca/eca/eim/article_search/article.asp?id=122&lang=e&frmPageSize=20&text only=false. '2 Andre Blais, Joanna Everitt, Patrick Fournier, Elisabeth Gidengil, and Neil Nevitte, "Why Johnny Won't Vote," The Globe and Mail, 4 August 2004.
15 The data we have so far examined leaves us with some odd conclusions concerning youth political attitudes and behaviours in Canada. Despite faring poorly when it comes to political knowledge and interest, and having a low sense of duty to vote, young Canadians are the most satisfied with federal election results and with democracy in Canada. It may simply be that in this case, ignorance is bliss. For instance, young Canadians were less concerned about the sponsorship scandal than older age groups, but this may simply have been because the issue did not register with them.33 Reported satisfaction with democracy and elections in Canada may simply be an ill-informed response to issues about which young Canadians are not that knowledgeable.
Our focus to this point has been only traditional means of political participation - voting and party membership. And it is clear that young Canadians seem disinterested in engaging in these political behaviours. But we do not yet have a complete account of what political participation is, or how youth are actually politically involved. We need to answer the question, 'what constitutes political participation?', before we can begin to understand the scope and nature of youth political engagement. How we answer this question will bear sharply on whether we think that there is a crisis of youth engagement in politics in Canada, or, if we are satisfied there is one, what sort of crisis of engagement it is. As we have seen, it is true that youth are less politically engaged in some ways than other generations, but this may not reflect the true degree of youth political apathy. When we look at other indicators of political involvement below, we will see that youth are not as disengaged as the data above suggests.
33 Blais et al, "Johnny."
16 Society, Cultural Politics, and Non-Traditional Political Participation
We can characterize political participation in terms of non-traditional and traditional means of participation. Broadly, we might define political engagement as any sort of involvement in the collective life of the polity that aims to change or shape the direction of that collective life. Political participation then becomes any sort of activity that shapes society. This sort of participation could extend to activities that we might not normally consider to be strictly within the political sphere - things like volunteering, or forms of cultural expression. Art, music, theatre, film, dance, literature, architecture, design; all of these can have political elements. Because they take place within our social world(s), that is, in the context of our collective life, they can be vehicles for political statement and expression, and they can be read in this context. Similarly, volunteering or involvement with community groups, charities, not-for-profits, interest groups, and many sorts of non-governmental organizations - all of these can reflect political inclinations and motivations, and also constitute types of political behaviours. These sorts of activities are political, and thus do constitute instances of participation, but we might say that this is political participation of a non- traditional nature.
Defining non-traditional political participation leads us towards a discussion of three concepts that we must distinguish between: society, culture, and politics.
These are distinct but overlapping spheres in the collective life of humans. In succeeding chapters this distinction will take on greater importance, and our discussion of these concepts will be more lengthy and complex then. For now, let us sketch their shape roughly, to provide a basis for distinguishing between them.
'Society' can refer to a community of people who are bound together through some
17 sort of shared custom, norm, or identity. Thus we can refer to 'Canadian society,' which may contain sub-groups that we can also identify as having their own status as a society; the often-referred to distinct society of Quebec is an excellent example, but we can also analyze less readily identifiable social groupings based upon other distinctions within Canadian society, whether they be regional, ethnic, linguistic, or religious, or based on differences in sexual orientation. All of these groups within
Canadian society have their own quality of sociality as well.
The various modes of expression that a given society engages in can be characterized as cultural elements of that society; language, art, music, shared beliefs, practices and institutions - these are all elements of culture. And when influence and power are exercised in society, in ways that constrain, develop, and guide collective life, then we are dealing with politics. Culture and politics are spheres within the social; they are levels or instances of social life. Whether culture and politics are spheres entirely subsumed by the social, and how they may interact and overlap, are questions we will for now leave unanswered, but return to in the next chapters.
Power is a key part of the social, political, and cultural. To give a succinct, widely agreed-upon definition of power is a job that political science struggles with, and it is not the intent of this thesis to wade into that particular discussion. That being said, there are certain assumptions regarding power and domination, and their relation to human agency, which will be at play in the this thesis, and it seems fitting to provide a rough introduction to the conception of power which will underlay much of our later discussion. The articulation of power herein is similar to that given by
Stephen Lukes, in Power: A Radical View. Lukes identifies, repeatedly, his own
18 conception as 'essentially contested,' which underscores for us the elusiveness of coming to a consensus on the definition of this concept.34
Qualifications aside, Lukes' 'third-dimension' of power has some characteristics we will note here briefly. It is broad, focusing on several ways through which power is exercised, and levels on which it may operate. Power is at play in the exercise of control over issues on the political agenda, whether this is through formal methods and channels of decision-making in government and the policy process, or more informal means such as manipulation of preferences and interests in relation to these issues. It is evident in control over what even makes it onto the political agenda; that is, power can shape and determine what issues become 'items' for discussion on the political agenda; what remain potential issues (that is, issues that might make it onto the political agenda); and even what does not become a potential issue (that is, has no chance of becoming open for political discussion). Power is at play in conflict, whether it is observable or latent conflict; put conversely, the absence of observable conflict does not mean that power is not at play in a situation. Indeed it may be that it is precisely because power is at play that no visible conflict arises. Finally, broadly, power may have be a factor in shaping the interests of individuals, obscuring from a person that which is actually in her best interest; the use of power might make a person think that A is in her interest when in fact B is.35 These characteristics of
Lukes' analysis of power give his conception a broad scope. When we examine
" Stephen Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2n ed., (NY, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 14 and 108, for example. " Lukes, Powert 25-29.
19 power at play in society we are, in Lukes' words, studying "the mechanisms that secure compliance to domination."36
This conception of power also reveals power to be at play at many levels within society, as well as the cultural and political spheres: through the agency of individual decisions and actions, the operation of larger social forces, the production and exchange of culture, or through social and political institutions. All of these can shape and constrain how we see the world, what we understand as possible, and how we act.
Before moving on here, it should be stressed again that the above are crude definitions of the concepts of society, culture and politics. This is partly due to their nature; as broad concepts they lend themselves to a certain roughness when we seek to define them tersely. More significantly they are also closely interrelated aspects of collective human life, referring to different pieces or sides of this life. This accounts for their close conceptual relationship. This relationship will be of interest to us in later chapters, when we discuss in greater deal its complex and subtle nature. For now we will return to our discussion of political participation. It was necessary at this point to raise briefly the concepts of society, culture, and politics to clarify our discussion of non-traditional participation as having political and cultural elements.
In defining political participation more narrowly we will typically look to indicators (as we did above) such as voter turnout and membership within a political party. These behaviours - voting and being a member of a political party - are more typical of what people mean when they talk about political participation, and can be termed traditional means of participation. And it is easy to see why: they are
'6 Lukes, Power, 111. explicitly and overtly political acts that take place within well established and clearly defined aspects of our political system. Writing a song, using design to shape experience of media and space, volunteering with a group that wants to protect green space in urban settings - these might have motives that are not political. One might engage in these activities out of an aesthetic impulse, or a concern for human well- being, without any overt, or even covert political intention.
Youth and Traditional vs. Non-Traditional Participation
The distinction between traditional and non-traditional means of political participation should be clear. In our further discussions of youth political apathy we will distinguish between these types of political expression. Young Canadians are clearly not as traditionally politically involved as other age groups, and this seems to reflect political apathy rather than cynicism; at the least (or perhaps the worst) young
Canadians may be less cynical about politics because they know less about it.
However, this apathy does not seem to carry over as heavily when we look at indicators of non-traditional involvement, particularly at involvement with interest groups. While young Canadians vote and join political parties in smaller numbers than older Canadians, they are much more likely, in relation to their participation in parties, to be involved with interest groups. The ratio of involvement in interest groups to political parties amongst Canadians 18-27 is 4.5 to 1; this falls to 3.1 to 1 for 28-37 year-olds, decreasing for every successive age cohort until reaching a low of 0.3 to 1 for those 57 years-old and over.37 And while all Canadians, interestingly,
'7 O'Neill, "Generational Patterns," 14. Note that these are ratios and do not provide an accurate picture of the relative involvement in interest groups between age groups. This will be discussed below.
21 identify interest groups as more effective instruments of political change than parties, young Canadians are most likely to hold this view, with 73 percent agreeing with a statement to that effect. 8
Young Canadians, when compared to other age groups, tend to choose involvement in interest groups, rather than in political parties, as a means of political participation. This seems to provide some counterpoint to the claim that Canadian youth are apathetic. In any case, youth are at the least probably not as apathetic as data on party membership and voter turnout might leads us to believe. O'Neill suggests that research on youth involvement in politics can be read in an optimistic light, indicating that it might be the case that
younger generations are more likely to engage in 'new politics,' to be concerned with non-economic issues such as human rights and the environment, and to be involved with non-traditional institutions and processes such as grassroots social movements and protest behaviour.... Younger generations, while perhaps more interested in the stuff of politics, are turned off by its traditional manifestations.39
This reading is in line with young Canadians' reported lack of cynicism about politics, as well as with their lack of traditional participatory practices. Young
Canadians tend not to see voting and membership in political parties as the best way of effecting political change.
This is troubling news for party and electoral politics in Canada. Because the current trend of youth apathy seems to be a generational effect, we are not likely to see this generation of youth become as politically active as earlier ones. This poses a real concern, as it means the current drop in voter turnout is not going to recover, at least not as result of current youth becoming significantly enough politically engaged
38 O'Neill, "Generational Patterns," 15. 39 O'Neill, "Generational Patterns," 8-9. to make it happen. As older citizens stop voting, and the current generation fails to pick up the slack left by the former's absence, we could see voter turnout decline further.
Through involvement in interest groups young Canadians do manage to maintain a valuable role in the nation's political life. Interest groups are part of a more informal aspect of our representative democracy. Involvement in the formal institutions of representation in Canada through actions such voting is not something youth are as inclined to engage in. Some of the perceived deficiencies that young
Canadians see in the representative character of our legislative institutions may help to explain why they find interest groups, with their focus on sectoral representation, more appealing than political parties, which are the main group actors within legislative institutions. As a group, youth are the most willing to adopt measures to increase diversity of representation in legislative institutions, where it is weak. For instance, 68 percent of those 18-27 years old think that parties should be required to increase the number of candidates who are visible minorities, compared to only 44 percent of those over 57. As well, 57 percent of 18-27 year olds think that parties should be required to increase the number of female candidates, and 70 percent think that a small number of seats should be set aside in Parliament for aboriginal peoples; both of these percentages are higher for this age group than for older ones.40
We must note that while youth are more inclined to become members of interest groups than of political parties, they still lag behind other age groups in terms of overall engagement in interest groups. Youth simply seem to prefer non-traditional means of participation to traditional means. Table 1, below, highlights this. It is in
40 O'Neill, "Generational Patterns," 28.
23 part because of youths' spectacularly low engagement in political parties that their ratio of political party to interest group engagement so high in comparison to other age groups.
Table 1: Ratio of Political Party to Interest Group Membership
18-27 28-37 38-47 48-57 Over 57 Has been a member of a political party 2 9 15 26 33 (percentage) Has been a member of an interest group 9 12 12 19 11 (percentage) Ratio (interest group/party 4.5 1.3 0.8 0.7 0.3 membership) Source: O'Neill, Generational Patterns, 13.
This data highlights that even taking into account interest group membership, youth are still less inclined to become politically involved than other age groups. This is troubling not just for party and electoral politics - as declines in party membership and voting are - but for the health representative democracy in Canada. The one bright point is that youth do seem to display a preference for 'new polities', which suggests that their apathy may not be as complete as it seems when we look at only indicators of traditional political involvement. As well, the group aged 28-37 - roughly the generational cohort previous to Generation Y - are still more inclined to engage with interest groups than political parties, perhaps a reflection of their having been born after or during 1960s and 70s, when modern organized interest groups
24 focused on social concerns, and representing students, consumers, aboriginals, women, and others, became more prominent.41
Given these developments, it is not surprising that younger generations of
Canadians in particular identify with interest groups as a more effective means of political change than political parties, which have arguably lost influence at the expense of interest groups.42 This could be an element of the generational effect which accounts for the current drop in youth engagement. Growing up in a political climate that has seen the increased presence and effectiveness of interest groups could be one factor contributing to the current trend in political party membership amongst
Canadian youth, and perhaps to the trend in voting as well. Political parties are central to the electoral process in Canada, and if youth feel that they are ineffective means of political change, they would be less motivated to cast a vote to bring a particular party to power.
Youth
Today's youth are the most educated generation in Canadian history, yet they lack an understanding of government and political institutions that reflects this level of education. They often do not see the link between politics, government, and policy, and the everyday reality they live in.43 In fact, more recent generations know less about politics, and they are unlikely to close this knowledge gap with older
41 A. Paul Pross, Group Politics and Public Policy, 2 ed., (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990) 21. 42 Pross, Group Politics, 1. 43 MacKinnon, Pitre, and Matling, "Lost in Translation," 5.
25 generations. There is a disconnect between youth and the stuff of traditional politics especially.
We have so far been discussing youth as if they are a homogenous group, which is of course not the case. Decline in turnout amongst youth is most significant amongst those youth who have not completed post-secondary education. Youth from low-income backgrounds, aboriginal youth, new Canadians, youth of some ethnic groups, and those with disabilities are less likely to be politically engaged. Young women are less inclined than young men to be engaged with a political party, tending towards interest group or advocacy type politics.
While looking at different sectors within the youth cohort does reveal variations in youth political participation, none of these variations can account for the current low in participation, which is a cross-cohort reality. Even amongst youth who have undertaken post-secondary education, a factor that has as very strong correlation with political participation, there is a drop in voter turnout.46
It is very significant that this drop in traditional turnout amongst youth does not seem to be correlated with a weak sense of national identity. In fact, recent research by Jason Bristow for the Canada West Foundation suggest that Canadians are more likely than citizens of other nations to identify with their national community, and that moreover, this national attachment rose from 30% to 40% between 1981-2000. 7 Specifically in regards to youth, focus group findings conducted as part of the same study showed that this generation is more likely to
44 O'Neill, Indifferent or Just Different, p.24. 45 MacKinnon, Pitre, and Matling, "Lost in Translation," 5-7. 46 MacKinnon, Pitre, and Matling, "Lost in Translation," 7. 47 Jason Bristow, The Next West, 12-13. identify with Canada as a geographical political unit when this was presented as one choice alongside others, including the World, North America, province, and city.
(Interestingly, for youth city was the second most common response, and the World was a close third.)
As we have seen, the drought of youth engagement can seemingly be explained by a lack of interest in politics, and the increased absence of a sense of duty to become involved in Canadian national politics. These behaviours and attitudes might in turn be explained by what Bristow characterizes as the rise of individualism, which is exhibited in a decline in rule following behaviour, and an outlook that casts things such as voting, as choices rather than obligations.49
These answers are incomplete though; they fail to really get to the 'why' of youth disengagement, at its underlying social causes. They are proximate explanations, and lead to further questions about what gives rise to the situations that they describe. And they also seem to be at odds with the finding that youth display a strong sense of national identity.
We will conclude this chapter by beginning to formulate an answer that will provide a more satisfactory, fundamental explanation. This answer starts with the presumption that though Canadian youth are a very heterogenous group (perhaps the most ethnically, socially, and economically diverse Canadian generation ever), they are nonetheless still all, to an extent, a product of their historical moment. Despite all their differences, Canadian youth have all experienced, in some way, a shared cultural and social reality. This shared reality amounts to a generational effect that has shaped
Bristow, Next West, 10. Bristow, Next West, 1.
27 youth's disconnection from politics. (An examination of the development of this historical moment, and some of its broad socio-cultural characteristics will be the
subject of the next chapter.)
There are characteristics that young Canadians share as a result of their
collective generational environment. It seems they tend towards more individualistic
forms of action, volunteerism, and forms of protest politics - all areas in which the
activity of young Canadians matches or exceeds that of older Canadians. This
includes things like membership in informal groups, engaging in protests, and a one-
on-one engagement with problems that is reflected in activities like consumer
boycotts, reducing one's carbon footprint, or working at a soup kitchen or with the
homeless. What is lacking in these responses to what are in many ways political
problems is a realization that they have a connection to the world of traditional
politics and public policy. The way youth tend to respond to these problems displays
an affinity for achieving immediate results in a way that is not so evident in
traditional politics.50 This may be a result of the increasing ubiquity of information
and communication technology which has in many ways increased the pace of life
and led to a more direct-results and action oriented culture.51
Another generational characteristic is that of delayed maturity; overall, young
Canadians today are living at home longer than previous generations. From 1981 to
2001, the percentage of young Canadians aged 25-29 still living at home doubled
from 12% to 24%. Moreover, the 2006 Census "found that 43.5% of young adults (20
to 29 years of age) have either remained at home with their families or have moved
50 O'Neill, "Indifferent of Just Different," 20. 51 MacKinnon, Pitre, and Matling, "Lost in Translation," 8.
28 back in (up from 41.1% in 2001)." This may play a role in explaining some aspects of a drop in traditional engagement that are normally accounted for by the lifecycle effect. Once people get into their thirties they tend to start becoming more traditionally politically involved. This trend is associated with a transition into adult life, with adult responsibilities that tend to make individuals more aware of practical concerns like taxes, healthcare, and saving for their future, which will in turn make them pay more attention to politics. However, this does not fully account for the fact that youth today are less traditionally politically involved than earlier youth cohorts were; it simply gives an explanation for why they may not be showing increased levels of involvement as theys near their thirties.
A third key generational characteristic is the increasing pervasiveness of a steadily growing barrage of information and communication technologies in the lives of youth. Youth have grown up in a world that has itself grown immensely from a technological standpoint; these technologies are becoming ever more ubiquitous as a part of our social and cultural lives and interaction. While the impacts of technology have been felt by all generations, they have had their greatest effects on the generation that has come of age with the Internet.53 Young Canadians are more likely to turn to the Internet for news and information than they are to newspapers and television. Large numbers of young Canadians are involved in online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. These sites and others provide a means for young Canadians to form communities that are less a result of geography and more of shared interests, concerns and experiences, and they challenge us to think
52 MacKinnon, Pitre, and Matling, "Lost in Translation," 8. 53 O'Neill, Indifferent or Just Different, 29.
29 about sociality in new ways. The increased use of the Internet and new technologies to create communities in this way mirrors the turn towards sectoral rather than geographic forms of representation seen in the preference of youth for interest groups over political parties.
Additionally, the Internet increases the speed of communication, and allows for a freer flow of information, and in doing so often challenges the place of authoritative sources of information. Research is lacking on how new media such as the Internet shapes the flow of political information, and allows for the formation of political identity.55 Indeed, the role of the Internet in identity formation in general amongst youth in a developed country such as Canada, where many youth are daily engaged with online information, communities and networks, is one which is key to understanding how youth situate themselves in the world, how they identify as
Canadians, and hence act politically. These concerns will be discussed more fully in
Chapter 3.
Finally, we need to understand youth in the context of their contrast, and to some extent conflict, with older generations, particularly boomers, who, as the largest, wealthiest generation in history have played a significant role in creating the socio-cultural world of today's youth, and defining the parameters of its politics and political discourse. The very
ways in which 'politics' is defined - partisan political attitudes, formal political events, policy issues and political news - may not be connecting with a broader and personal understanding that young people have of politics and of those public issues that they care deeply about.56
54 O'Neill, Indifferent or Just Different, 30. 55 O'Neill, Indifferent or Just Different, 30. 56 MacKinnon, Pitre, and Matling, "Lost in Translation," 12. Youth and other generations may disagree over common uses of the terms 'politics' and 'political'. Returning to our earlier definition of politics - as dealing with how influence and power are exercised in society, in ways that constrain, develop, and guide collective life - we can reflect that youth no doubt care about politics under this definition. This is evinced by their volunteer, protest and advocacy activity. But it is when politics is defined in terms of'partisan political attitudes, formal political events, policy issues, and political news' - in ways that reflect a certain framing of what constitutes the political - that they tend to be less engaged.
And when youth and older generations do engage with the political on the same terms, as in a general election, there is evidence of a generational conflict of priorities. One survey suggests that in the 2004 election, young Canadians were most likely to identify concerns related to education and the economy, two areas not given significant attention by major political parties in that election cycle, as those that were most important to them.57 Those issues that were of greater importance to older generations, heath care and corruption in government, got significantly more play.
This chapter has shown that the relationship between youth and the political in
Canada is a complex one. Youth are overwhelmingly less traditionally politically involved than older Canadian generations. This disconnect from the political is not as clear cut when we look at non-traditional forms of engagement, however. And it is clear that the relationship between youth and politics is intimately linked to the social, cultural and political environment in which they grew up. Our task in the next
O'Neill, Indifferent or Just Different, 27.
31 chapters will be to further frame our understanding of youth and politics in the context of their socio-cultural moment.
32 Chapter 2: Networked Late Capitalism
But you've gotta know their lies, From the lies they've told you. If you try to do it up It all will leave you. If you try to steal the beat, The beat will steal you. - Broken Social Scene, " 7/4 (Shoreline) "'
This chapter has two distinct yet related goals. First, it will begin to give an account of the socio-cultural moment of Canadian youth. This account will be developed through a discussion of certain economic, social, and cultural forces and tendencies that have characterized the development of capitalism over the last half of the twentieth century and the first part of the current one. Mainly through the work of
Herbert Marcuse, Frederic Jameson and Yochai Benkler, we will follow the steady development of capitalism from industrial economy, to industrial information economy, and into the early stages of what can be characterized as the "networked information economy," to use Benkler's term for our current socio-economic reality. We will see that these theorists integrate quite nicely: Benkler provides an articulation of the new space of networked late capitalism, and of how it changes cultural production; and Marcuse and Jameson supply accounts of earlier iterations of
38 Broken Social Scene, "7/4(Shoreline)," Broken Social Scene, 2005, CD. 59 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2006), 2.
33 capitalism, and critiques of capitalist society which are still important in the emergent social context, which is the milieu in which today's youth are coming of age.
The following objection might be raised to the use of these three authors in developing a single narrative that describes the development of capitalist society from the mid-20th century through our current moment: Marcuse and Jameson on the one hand are grounded in the critical tradition that is weighted towards a Marxian conception of production and society, while Benkler, who opens The Wealth of
Networks with an epigraph from Mill's On Liberty, owes more to the liberal tradition.
Nor should this distinction minimize differences between Marcuse and Jameson.
These issues will be confronted in more detail in the course of our discussion of the development of capitalist society, but we can in general characterize our efforts to overcome this difficulty by pointing to a unifying discussion of society and culture that stretches through the works of each of the authors which allows us to form a coherent historical narrative of the development of capitalism towards our current moment. This effort is aided considerably by the privileged role that Benkler designates to culture, which leads him away from a characterization of human agency in strict rationalist terms and lends a strong constructivist element to his discussion of
• ± 60 society.
The second task undertaken in this chapter is to show that the methodological core of critical theory - immanent critique - provides us with a powerful tool to describe responses to forces of domination in capitalist society. Using the work of
Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, David Held, and Robert Antonio we will give an account
60 See for instance Benkler, Wealth, Chapter 8: "Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical"
34 of this method. This concept of the immanent subject will allow us to articulate a path that might provide some possibilities for moving beyond some of the aspects of alienation and de-centering of the subject that occurred as capitalism developed.
Returning to Jameson and Benkler in the next chapter, we will then use immanence as the basis for a concept of subject-hood in late capitalist networked society.
From Market Capitalism to the Networked Information Society: The Development of Society and Culture
Before providing a discussion of the development of capitalism, there are some terms related to this discussion that we should clarify. Jameson articulates a tripartite development of capitalism, which has culminated in the era of late capitalism, in which culture is the "the very element of consumer society itself."61
Jameson takes the term 'late capitalism,' as well as his division of capitalism into three periods from Ernest Mandel. These three periods are market capitalism, the era of imperialism or monopoly capital, and our current, multinational era, which is the late capitalist period. Late capitalism, or the postmodern era, represents for Jameson the completion of the modernist capitalist project. According to him, "modernization was the process of transformation: the generalization of industrial production, the mechanization of the various spheres of social life, and generally the subsumption of society under capital."62 This process, under late capitalism, is now complete; the entire world is subsumed under capital; hence the designation of this as the postmodern era. This is an expansion upon the scope of advanced industrial society
61 Frederic Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," in The Jameson Reader, ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Maiden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 135. 62 Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, The Jameson Reader (Maiden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing), 16.
35 identified by Marcuse, who was concerned primarily with those nations that were advanced industrial societies in the 1950s, '60s and '70s: North America and Western
Europe in particular (though he was just as critical of centralized, bureaucratic communist regimes, e.g. Soviet Marxism). Jameson focuses on the global scale of capitalism, its massive scope as a trans-national arena, as the defining element of society. This "purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas... eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated or exploited in only tributary ways."63 This expansion is not only geographic; capital increasingly extends into aspects social of our life, such as culture, ushering in the commodification of these spheres as well.
Benkler also distinguishes between different eras of capitalism, discussing its expansion through social and geographic space. Jameson's development from market to late capitalism is framed in terms of changes to capitalist society, and its relation to culture. Benkler's distinctions focus more heavily on technological changes that led from the industrial economy, to the industrial information economy, and into the development of the networked information economy. He notes that the term
'information economy' emerged during the 1970s, but he argues that throughout the twentieth century there were elements of the information economy already at work in controlling the industrial economy.64 At the same time as the economy was shifting to one centred on information, technology made possible the increased social and physical or geographic scope of distribution networks. Corresponding to this
(roughly) century long development of the industrial information economy, "an
63 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (USA: Duke University Press, 1991), 36. 64 Benkler, Wealth, 31.
36 economy centred on information (financial services, accounting, software, science) and cultural (films, music) production, and the manipulation of symbols (from making sneakers to branding them and manufacturing the cultural significance of the
Swoosh)," and its expansion through new social and geographic spaces, is the development of late capitalism out of the earlier form of monopoly capital.65 Both of these developments reached maturity in roughly the same period, in the first decades of the second half of the twentieth century. So there is then some temporal congruence between Jameson's conception of the development of capitalist society and Benkler's evolution of the information economy, and even a coherence in their views of the relationship between capitalist society and cultural production. This will be explored further later in this chapter, when we examine the contention that
Benkler's articulation of the networked information economy constitutes a further development of late capitalist society.
Herbert Marcuse and Advanced Industrial Society
Marcuse authored his critique of capitalism during the middle of the twentieth century, during the era when late capitalism, or the information economy was emergent. I will argue below that the account of capitalism he gives in his critique corresponds to the era when monopoly capital (for Benkler, the industrial economy) was in the process of ceding its prominence to late capitalism (the information economy).
Benkler, Wealth, 3.
37 On Marcuse's account capitalist society has given rise to a deep alienation rooted in the commodity nature of society.66 This account is today not that startling or unfamiliar; we are often invited to consider the consumerist, materialist aspects of our society which critics decry as shallow and dehumanizing.67 Theorists such as Marcuse have rendered such an account of society with considerable detail and subtlety, focusing on the forces and institutions within society which perpetuate our race against the obsolescence of products, the continual need to acquire what is new. This drive is placed in the context of those conditions which give rise to it: the administered nature of life within advanced industrial society, and the emphasis on the competitive, aggressive, destructive side of human nature that such a society engenders.
Marcuse argues that modern industrial society has realized the technological and material conditions by which we might free ourselves from the wants and needs imposed by external nature (that is, Nature - the elements, the wild). We are no longer, except in the case of extreme weather and natural disasters, quite so immediately at its mercy. Instrumental reason has served us that far at least. We can carry on with our day-to-day lives more or less unencumbered by the constraints of external nature, beyond those imposed by the occasional weather event, disaster, or change in season. But in exchange for this freedom we have found ourselves subject to domination through new forms of control, and at the mercy of new socially
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 11. 67 See, for instance, almost any issue of Adbusters magazine: Adbusters, Adbusters Magazine. http://wwvv.adbuste-rs.org/magazine/78 (accessed July 10, 2008).
38 constructed needs. Second nature, which is both the all-encompassing consumer society created by capitalism and the human nature constructed under such a system, has made possible new relations of domination within society. In the early pages of
An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse argues just this:
The so-called consumer economy and the politics of corporate capitalism have a created a second nature of man.. .The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines offered to and imposed upon people, for using these wares even at the danger of one's own destruction, has become a "biological" need...The second nature of man thus militates against any change that would disrupt and perhaps even abolish this dependence of man on a market ever more densely filled with merchandise....69
The scope and character of individual action is severely constrained by advanced industrial society. These constraints reflect the very deep shift to second nature which has taken place. Our 'biological' configuration has been changed, in that we are now operating under a set of norms imposed by capitalist society, and these norms affect our actions and reactions: they affect how we act at a pre-conscious level.70 Our agency as subjects has been curtailed, and we can exercise this agency across only the limited scope of choices provided under the capitalist system. This situation is what we referred to in our discussion of Lukes' three-dimensional view of power in the previous chapter. Forces of domination within advanced capitalist society bear sharply upon the freedom we can exercise, constraining it, often without us even being aware of this in our day-to-day lives.
Alienation on Marcuse's account manifests itself in our alienation from the aesthetic realization of our humanity, which has become impossible under the
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 5. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 11. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 11.
39 conditions of second nature. We cannot be truly free in expressing the creative aspects of our humanity.71 For Marcuse though, this alienation is not merely manifested in the political. Rather, it extends to the political through its immediate manifestation in our alienation from the processes and products of our own labour, and from our own social human character, which have become structured according to the forces and demands of advanced industrial society.
The technological achievements in capitalism have made 'traditional' labour less physically arduous through the automation and semi-automation of these processes; much of the work required in advanced industrial society - in the emergent information society - is mental rather than physical.72 Nevertheless, all forms of work, whether manual, semi-automated, or professional, require adherence to routine in accordance with the capitalist system. Exploitation includes both economic exploitation in the extraction of surplus-value, but also alienation in that labour requires us to conform to the confines of the capitalist system. Under advanced industrial society this latter sort of exploitation plays an increasingly large role in alienation; it is not simply workers who are engaged in forms of physical labour who are exploited and dominated by the system. Those performing mental and technical labour are as well, in that they perform the non-physical forms of labour which are required for the perpetuation of the capitalist system.
It is not just the exploited classes which are subject to domination by the capitalist system; all those living in such a society are subject to some form of domination. Under capitalism "the organizers and administrators themselves become
71 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 10. 72 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 25.
40 increasingly dependant on the machinery which they organize and administer. And this mutual dependence is.. .a vicious circle which encloses both the Master and
Servant."73 Advanced industrial society binds everyone in its powerful structures, keeping people within from recognizing their freedom and human nature, regardless of their place in society. This is a point which was not emphasized when discussing
Lukes' account of power. It is apparent that certain individuals and groups within society are more at the whim of the power of others. The additional contention here is that everyone in society is to some degree subject to the power that is exercised by groups or individuals, and/or by forces which constrain their freedom by virtue of the structural features of society. No one is entirely capable of exercising his or her humanity in any way which he or she chooses, because, by its nature, advanced industrial society circumscribes our freedom.
Reason and technology, the two main tools of industrial society, which have made all its accomplishments possible, have been used to create a society that inhibits our freedom in this way. Marcuse does not, on this basis, advocate to us that we do away with the use of reason and technology in society; on the contrary, he sees these as having emancipatory potential, when directed properly, a theme which we will develop later. It is reason and technology, when used merely for the sake of productivity and efficiency that have led to the creation of a repressive second nature.
And it is not technology itself which keeps us fettered, at least not on their own. It does so only in its context as part of the capitalist system:
Not the automobile is repressive, not the television set is repressive, not the household gadgets are repressive, but the
73 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 33. 74 See for instance: Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 227ff.
41 automobile, the television, the gadgets, which, produced in accordance with the requirements of profitable exchange, have become part and parcel of the people's own existence, own "actualization." Thus they have to buy part and parcel of their own existence on the market; this existence is the realization of capital. The naked class interest builds unsafe and obsolescent automobiles, and through them promotes destructive energy.75
The beginning of this quote illustrates the point made above, but the last words lead us along another important path. Marcuse notes the 'destructive energy' which capitalism emphasizes.
This is thanatos, the Freudian desire for death and destruction which is, on the
Marcusean account, one of the central drives in individual and collective human life.
The current capitalist system strengthens this drive by constructing a social reality which rewards competition, advancement at the expense of others, and wasteful and destructive use of our environment, and leads to aggressiveness, conflict, manipulation and repression. The force that balances this, eros, is the life-affirming, creative, sensual side of human nature, which is often the victim of the established social order; it is this side of our nature which is a casualty of a repressive, advanced industrial society. The reinforcement of thanatos, and the corresponding subjugation of eros, in the capitalist system is the factor which must be redressed if we hope to move towards the creation of a free society.76
So, in advanced industrial society our actual creativity in determining the outcomes of our labour is restricted, exchanged for our subjugation to a system which provides for a continually expanding repertoire of needs that are determined by
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 12. 76 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge, 1956; reprint London: Ark Paperbacks, 1987), 203ff. second nature. Alienation from politics is a manifestation of this broader process of alienation which arises from capitalist society. In advanced industrial society no real political alternatives exist; all perpetuate the domination of second nature, and are simply different faces of the same old political institutions and practices in a bureaucratic state, because they exist to perpetuate the current system with only slight variations.78 Political contest still occurs in the arena defined by the structures of capitalist society; there are no real emancipatory opportunities offered within the system.
Our alienation is not born out of a cynicism towards politics then, but rather from deeper structural features of capitalist society which keep ordinary citizens from exercising any meaningful political power. On the Marcusean account, many of us may be unaware that this is really the case in exercising our agency in daily life. The structures of domination offer the illusion of freedom; Marcuse's assertion in the opening line of One-Dimensional Man sums this up perfectly, when he says that "a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilizations."79 This unfreedom remains for the most part concealed from us by the appearance of political alternatives, and the endless array of material goods, comforts, and needs that advanced industrial society has given us. When we do get a sense that we may not be experiencing true freedom we are distracted again by this all this choice, or more accurately the illusion of real choice, and the aggressive drive to compete with others in order to satisfy these imposed needs:
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 12. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 24. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 1.
43 The high standard of living in the domain of the great corporations is restrictive in a concrete sociological sense: the goods and services that the individuals buy control their needs and petrify their faculties. In exchange for the commodities that enrich their life, individuals sell not only their labour but also free time. The better living is offset by all- pervasive control over living. People...have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue - which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.80
Alienation should then be understood as a feature of the manipulative and repressive
structures of advanced industrial society, and political alienation and disengagement is simply a manifestation of this. This is, again, the situation which pertains in Lukes' three-dimensional view of power: not only are our preferences and apparent needs being shaped by external forces, but we may not even be aware that this is the case.
Thus, on a Marcusean account of alienation, really engaging youth, and all
citizens, will require a significant shift in traditional politics; we will need to rethink
politics, rework political institutions, and find types of economic relations that do not
institutionalize domination and repression. Marcuse does not offer us a concrete path
to overcoming domination, and hence alienation. But he does argue that it will
involve the development of a 'new sensibility'. This new sensibility requires an
avowal of the creative, life-affirming side of human nature, a commitment to take
productive forces beyond those ends recognized by capitalism: efficiency,
competition, profit, in short the production of an ever retreating horizon of needs and
desires which serve to perpetuate the continued waste, destruction and oppression of
human nature and our environment. The new sensibility recognizes the "development
of productive forces beyond their capitalist organization," and grows from "men and
80 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 100.
44 women who have the good conscience of being human, tender, sensuous, who are no longer ashamed of themselves... [who] would fashion their reason and tend to make the process of production a process of creation.81
Marcuse thus brings an aesthetic dimension into his account of how we might free ourselves from a repressive society. Reason and technology will serve as instruments in the creation of a genuinely free society when they are guided by this new sensibility, by creative, aesthetic impulses. Our creative, life-affirming nature must guide reason, acting as its final cause. This line of argument prompts Marcuse to quote Alfred North Whitehead: "The function of Reason is to promote the art of living."82
We can now see that on a Marcusean account, even engaging in the political
system will fail to bring about real change, unless we approach it having engaged the new sensibility, "which expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness
and guilt."83 (The role of technology and cultural production in politics and political
identity will be discussed further in this chapter and the next.)
As noted, political alienation is something that all individuals are subject to under advanced industrial society. Our concern, however, is specifically with youth
alienation. In light of this it is worth noting that the closest Marcuse does come to
offering us some concrete direction for change, is in a discussing where it the impetus
for change will come from. The proletariat, which on Marx's account was going to be
the vanguard of the revolution, does not hold that prospect now; the working classes,
8' Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 21. 82 Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959): 5, quoted in Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 228. '' Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 23.
45 such as they are, have in developed countries been too far co-opted into capitalist society, brought to share in its comforts, made to believe that real freedom is a prospect for them because they are no longer subject to the same brutal scarcity, privation, horrendous working conditions, and marginalization that they had been in earlier industrial society.
Marcuse, writing in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, identified two groups with the potential to be the incubators of a revolutionary impulse: the ghetto populations of American cities, and the young, middle-class intelligentsia.84
This latter is of interest to us. Marcuse argues that one of the reasons this group provides the potential is because these are individuals who have the opportunity to study history, art, politics, and the sciences, and engage critically with questions about human nature, freedom and the structure of society. Many go onto become part of the workforce in the capitalist system, which further alienates them given that, through their education, they may have some notion of how things could be better.
This becomes a sort of second order alienation, one based on the subjective experience of being alienated. Such an individual is being objectively alienated by the nature of the advanced industrial system, becoming just another small piece of a larger machine in which he or she has no real vested interest, and does damage to his or her genuine, creative impulses. The individual is also aware that this is the case, has an experience of it, and must confront the realization.
The middle-class as a whole does not become a revolutionary force though.
There are simply certain individuals, perhaps small groups, within the middle-class, that are aware of the predicament facing citizens in advanced industrial society.
84 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 52.
46 Marcuse characterizes them as "potential catalysts of rebellion within the majorities
Of to which, by virtue of their class origin, they belong." Active minorities within the middle-class are drawn to become politically involved, even radical.
This group, the middle class, is one that, oddly, displays one of the highest levels of political participation among any youth demographic. Middle class Canadian youth, who have some post-secondary education, are more likely to vote than any other group of Canadian youth.86 There might be some question as to whether
Marcuse and O'Neill are referring to the same sort of group within society. It should not be too much of a stretch to assume that both groups have at least these characteristics in common though: that they, in general, are situated in a socio economic bracket that allows them the time and resources to study, but they also find it necessary to work (that is, alienate their labour). That they have been given the opportunity to pursue education, and thus have a more acute subjective experience of alienation than their peers who have not had the opportunity, might drive such individuals to be both more traditionally involved, and/or drive them to be the "active minority" that Marcuse refers to. Both behaviours can seen as a response to the status quo, as the expression of an urge to change the conditions of individuals and society.
We should also note that Marcuse's account, again given that he wrote in the
1960s and 1970s, might not seem relevant as we examine the apathy of a generation born for the most part after this. As well, his critique is aimed at an earlier iteration of capitalism than our current one. But we will see how many of the conditions of advanced industrial society which Marcuse writes about have intensified. As well,
85 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 52. 86 O'Neill, Examining Decline.
47 even if we accept this objection, there are still several elements of Marcuse which we have noted that are helpful to us. His critique of advanced industrial society provides a framework in which we can understand Lukes' conception of power, and how it is at work in society. The identification of the 'middle-class intelligentsia' as one potential catalyst for change still holds. Additionally, his critical account of society provides a nice introduction to the social theory of Fredric Jameson, which we will discuss next.
Frederic Jameson and Late Capitalism
In "Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson, gives an historicized theoretical account of the current cultural dominant - postmodernism. The postmodern is an expression (the "cultural logic") of the late capitalist moment; it developed from earlier iterations of the relationship between society and capital, and is the result of the expansion of capital along both geographic and social dimensions. Jameson is not trying to reduce postmodernism to a kind of ethical choice about a particular aesthetic (e.g., the merits of a postmodern versus modern aesthetic); rather, for him the key is to understand this aesthetic as a symptom or expression of that moment of capitalist development. For Jameson, postmodernism is "a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and new economic order."87
In defending his ethically agnostic approach to understanding the late capitalist era, Jameson cites Marx's historical dialecticism, which urges us to think of
87 Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in The Cultural Turn, ed. Fredric Jameson. (USA: Verso, 1998), 3.
48 historical change in terms of advancement by the coexistence of competing, even incompatible, ideas, events, texts, and historical impetuses. To fully understand the implications of capitalism for and on society, and human history, we must be able be able to understand capitalism this way:
[i]n a well-known passage Marx urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any force of either judgement. We are some how to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has happened to the human race, and the worst.88
Jameson does in other essays articulate concern with some aspects of our capitalist society, with how it does create repressive, manipulative elements and institutions in society, similar to Marcuse. But in "Postmodernsm, Or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism," he is concerned that we understand his characterization of postmodernism as a culturally dominant historical development, not a simple description of a given style or aesthetic. And he does not consider this postmodernism to be an articulation of complete, undifferentiated cultural homogeneity in the period of late capitalist society. Rather, it is the dominant cultural current in which we can locate and contextualize all manner of cultural expression.
The defining feature of this cultural logic, and what differentiates it from modernist and other, earlier, cultural periods, is the complete commodification of the arena of culture, as it becomes coextensive with the sphere of capitalist society:
[w]hat has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever greater more novel-seeming
Jameson, Postmodernism, Al.
49 goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.
All aesthetic expression is already a commodity in the postmodern era, because it is created or produced within the structures of the total capitalist society.
Returning to our discussion of the relationship between culture and society from the previous chapter, we can begin to see how it functions differently on the
Marcusean and Jamesonian accounts, and we can refine and historicize our accounts of society and culture. On the Marcusean account one of the functions of culture is to provide a critique of capitalist society; for Jameson, culture in late capitalism is commodity.
We saw above that for Marcuse, the new sensibility develops out of some critical space between the subject and repressive capitalist society, emerging from the subjects' contradictory experience of life in advanced capitalist societies. There is at least a level of autonomy which culture exhibits from the social on this account; culture has - in fact requires - a critical distance from society if it is going to adequately critique society. The development of the new sensibility requires this space, at least mentally. For individuals to hope to engage the new sensibility they must have an aesthetic, cultural space which has not been colonized by capitalism.
Culture, and the aesthetic, are thus semi-autonomous for Marcuse, allowing for a space of mental freedom which must presage the turn to a new, liberated society.
The Marcusian account aligns with the second stage of capitalism which
Jameson discusses; the era of imperialist, or monopoly capital, when capitalism had moved beyond the level of national markets, but did not yet command the totalizing
Jameson, Postmodernism, 4-5.
50 position it holds in its third stage. Marcuse's critique can be read more accurately as applying to this second stage of capitalism, but he was writing at the end of this capitalist moment, during its transition into the era of multinational capital, which
Jameson identifies as having begun sometime during the middle decades of the twentieth century (though it has no specific turning point, but emerged gradually as the dominant from the earlier era of capitalism).90
Jameson sees the multinational stage of capital as having led to the end of this semi-autonomy of culture. This does not mean that there is now no cultural sphere, but rather that culture is now coextensive with the social. He does not say that the former has been destroyed, but
[q]uite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture through the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life - from economic value and state power to practices and the very structure of the psyche itself- can be said to have become "cultural"....91
This change in the relationship of society and culture from the second to the third stage of capitalism is accounted for by the turn from modernism to postmodernism.
Modernist forms of cultural expression play on themes "of alienation, anomie, isolation, social fragmentation, and isolation," which serve to underscore the profound feelings of anxiety and alienation of the individual in capitalist society.
Jameson identifies Van Gogh's A Pair of Boots, which depicts a pair of crumpled and well-used peasant shoes, and Edvard Munch's The Scream, the well-known painting of an androgynous figure with hands clasped to cheeks in a silent scream, as
90 Jameson, Postmodernism, 1. 91 Jameson, Postmodernism, 48. " Jameson, Postmodernism, 11.
51 exemplary instances of this modernist project. In articulating these themes they are giving us a certain type of representation of the world. We can interpret them as hermeneutical "in the sense in which its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth."93 This attempt at representation of some reality beyond that given in the form or content of the text or piece is characteristic of the modernist aesthetic. In critiquing society, modernist works attempt to stand outside the reality created by capital and show us how we stand in relation to it, how we are alienated by it, and perhaps offer us a glimpse at a Utopian realm beyond the reach of capital, in which humans and nature are free from the established order. There is a presumed critical distance that individuals can obtain, or maintain, from which they can mount their defence against, or assault on, the social reality of capital.
In postmodern forms of cultural expression, many of these features are absent.
There is no affect, no attempt to demonstrate the themes of alienation and isolation, to exhibit or represent possible Utopias, which we see in the modernist aesthetic. We will discuss two characteristics of the postmodern which illustrate this shift. The first is a new depthlessness in postmodern aesthetic expression, which Jameson sees exemplified by works of Andy Warhol, such as his Diamond Dust Shoes, which depicts a simple collection of shoes.94 There is no attempt to represent anything beyond what we see on the surface of Warhol's work. Instead of representation through depth, we see an attempt at textual play, at intertextuality. This is apparent in
Warhol's depictions of a Campbell's soup can, and in that of "stars - like Marilyn
9j Jameson, Postmodernism, 8. 94 Jameson, Postmodernism, 8-9.
52 Monroe - who are themselves commodified and turned into their own images."
Such postmodern texts explicitly herald the commodity form which has come to permeate all forms of cultural production in late capitalism. There is no clue to any sort of interpretation of what these works represent; we are left only with the surface of the text and its depiction of, its reference to, the commodity form.
Nor is there reference to the individual subject in such postmodern expression.
Jamesone refers to this as the '"death of the subject' or, to say it in more conventional language, the end of individualism as such."96 Modernist themes of isolation and alienation are not at play in the postmodern aesthetic because there has been a shift - and this is the second development which Jameson articulates - from the alienation of the subject in the second stage of capitalism to the fragmentation of the subject in late capitalism.97 Jameson describes this as the dissolution of the monad-like subject; this
"once-existing centered subject, in the period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organizational bureaucracy dissolved."98 The problems of anxiety and isolation experienced by the individual subject in the modernist era of classical capitalism have given away to a sort of schizophrenia, understood in aesthetic, not clinical or psychological, terms, and which can have elements of anxiety and disconnection from reality, as well as euphoria. This schizophrenia is apparent in the individual's attempt to orient him or herself temporally or spatially within late capitalism, without having the benefit (and also disadvantages) of high-modernist subject-hood which can be used to differentiate the
95 Jameson, Postmodernism, 11. 96 Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," 5. Jameson, Postmodernism, 14 98 Jameson, Postmodernism, 15.
53 inner world of the subject from the outer world of capital. This 'monadlike' subject- hood dramatizes
the unhappy paradox that when you constitute your individual subjectivity as a self-sufficient field and a closed realm, you thereby shut yourself off from everything else and condemn yourself to the mindless solitude of the monad, buried alive and condemned to a prison cell without egress.
This is precisely the predicament, articulated so clearly with oil and canvas in The
Scream, of the modern subject. The postmodern individual, who while not a discrete subject in the sense of the modern one, might be understood as a de-centered subject, lacks the ability to close him or herself off from the late capitalist society; he or she cannot escape it, cannot simply withdraw to a fortress of personal creativity, style and expression, uncolonized by the forces of capital, that will serve to demarcate the boundary of the individual. When we discuss contemporary Canadian music in the next chapter we will provide some powerful examples of the way that this subject- hood is expressed.
The de-centering of the subject has led to the erosion of modernist forms of style. The modernist individual subject was a vehicle for the projection of individual style: modernist aesthetic production was the projection outward by an individual, or collection of individuals, of something felt, some profound cry into the abyss of capitalist society at the isolation and alienation engendered by it.100 With the death of the autonomous subject this is no longer possible. Stylistically unique and individual cultural production is no longer possible under late capitalism, and so we are left with a culture which has as its dominant form the simulacrum. Cultural production looks
99 Jameson, Postmodernism, 15. 100 Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," 6.
54 now to the past, to re-iterations of past styles, events, and texts; it is, as Jameson says,
"the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture."101
This erosion of style, and the turn to the past for elements of aesthetic products in the postmodern era has had the effect of creating the sense of temporal dislocation mentioned above. Of course, our constant reference to the past in culture, the "nostalgia mode"102 made explicit in what Jameson terms "nostalgia films," which depict a certain event or period in history, do not actually give us a definitive view of the past.103 In fact, such products frequently reflect the moods, anxieties, and issues of the present, setting them in reference to past eras. By such "aesthetic colonization" of the past we are creating simulacra, thereby breaking any reference to the real past.104
This has the effect of creating temporal dislocation, as cultural production comes to refer to not a real past, but simply texts. (This brings us back to the point made earlier about postmodern cultural products being depthless and intertextual. It also highlights a point which Jameson makes repeatedly in "Postmodernism" - the difficulty of thinking about the postmodern historically.105)
This temporal disorientation can help us understand the cultural schizophrenia that has come to replace the modernist isolation and alienation. This schizophrenia can be described as the overwhelming of the subject by the present moment:
The present of the world or material signifier comes before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect... [which can be described] in the negative terms of anxiety and
101 Jameson, Postmodernism, 18. 102 Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," 7-10. 103 Jameson, Postmodernism, 19. 104 Jameson, Postmodernism, 19. 105 For instance, Jameson, Postmodernism, 19-20.
55 loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity.106
Jameson does not wish to carry the clinical connotations of the word schizophrenia in his use of it. He uses it simply as a way of expressing the severe sense of dislocation from past and future which late capitalism can evoke, an experience which may have negative or euphoric elements. (Recall Jameson's view, discussed above, of postmodernism as the aesthetic mode, for better or for worse, of late capitalism.)
When we also examine the spatial disorientation which the global scope of capital engenders we can appreciate this more fully. The global reach of capital is vast, diffuse and yet so strong, institutionalized by markets, governments, inter governmental organization and non-governmental organizations. It has no clear centre, only concentrations, as in financial centres such as New York City, London and Shanghai; symbols, of which the World Trade Centre in New York was a pre eminent example107; institutions, such as private banks, the International Monetary
Fund, and the World Bank; and a dizzying array of actors, from multi-national corporations to small businesses to the individuals who provide all the services required to keep it living and growing. It is clearly all around us, but its structure and workings are so arcane, vast and so varied, that attempting to understand its totalizing scope and effects is beyond the means and perspective granted any individual. Given this situation, Jameson urges that
[w]hat we must now affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily demoralizing and depressing original new global space which is the "moment of truth" of postmodernism. What has been called the postmodern "sublime" is only the moment in which this
106 Jameson, Postmodernism, 27-28. 107 And, significantly, capitalism survived the devastating attack on this symbol/centre.
56 content has become most explicit, has moved the closest to the surface 1 ("18
of consciousness as a coherent new type of space in its own right.
The postmodern sublime must be recognized as a moment when we become aware of the new relation of culture and society, as we have seen. But the integration of culture and society under postmodernism encompasses the political as well, so that politics can be seen as occurring within the broader context of capitalist society, events within its sphere commodified and consumed like other elements of mass culture, in accordance with a system which places everything in the context of its exchange value. This also means that the political takes on an aesthetic dimension.
Understanding the nature of the political as a cultural and aesthetic arena, and the political implications of culture and the aesthetic, will be crucial to understanding the real nature of youth political (dis)engagement in Canada.
We can now give an articulation of how power and domination are at play in culture and society in the postmodern era. We have seen how culture and society are now thoroughly integrated in the era of late capital; how late capitalism has seen the explosion of culture through society, commodity culture having now become the central element of society. With the fragmentation of the subject in the postmodern era, the very destruction of our monad-like discrete existence as totally distinct subjects, we must radically rethink how the political relates to the aestheticized socio- cultural sphere. Domination within society is still an important part of understanding the nature of the political in the postmodern era. Lukes' third-dimension of power, in which our attitudes, beliefs, preferences, even wants and needs can be manipulated and determined by the structure and form of society, and by powerful individuals and
108 Jameson, Postmodernism, 49.
57 groups within society, is, if anything, more relevant given such an understanding of the integration of society and culture.
On the Marcusian account of our hope for a liberated society, we require a critical distance, one provided by culture or the aesthetic, in order to nurture the individual and social impulses that would give birth to such a society. Jameson's account of postmodernism has closed that critical distance: capitalist society and commodity culture are too deeply tied together to allow for this distance. Though much social and cultural theory on the Left still uses the langue of critical distance, there is no space outside of capital which will provide this critical distance. Hence
Jameson's assertion that
[fjhe shorthand language of co-optation is for this reason omnipresent on the left, but would now seem to offer a most inadequate theoretical basis for understanding a situation in which we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that not only punctual and countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a party, since they can achieve no distance from it.109
All forms of cultural expression which seek to offer a critique of the established order, which decry the oppression and inequity in capitalist society by maintaining a critical distance and assaulting it from without are already co-opted, appropriated by virtue of the structural features of late capitalism, which denies any space outside of itself for cultural expression.
Jameson, Postmodernism, 49.
58 Yochai Benkler and the Networked Information Economy
As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Benkler has a somewhat different intellectual pedigree than Marcuse and Jameson, although this is matched by features of his writing that are sympathetic to the latter authors. This is apparent in the language he employs throughout The Wealth of Networks, and when he describes his project, of which one of the central claims
is that the diversity of ways of organizing information [as well as cultural] production and use opens a range of possibilities for pursuing the core political values of liberal societies - individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice.110
His goal in The Wealth of Networks is to show that emerging networked society is generating this range of possibilities (although the outcome of this opening remains to be determined, in large part by what he characterizes as the coming institutional, legal and regulatory battles over the 'ecology' of the digital environment). The project is underwritten by an optimism for the possibilities that "information, knowledge and culture" hold for human freedom and development.111 While Benkler's belief in possibilities for human freedom and development in liberal societies speaks to his liberal theoretical commitments, this grouping - information, knowledge, and culture
- is ubiquitous throughout The Wealth of Networks, and speaks to his sensitivity to questions of culture and society. We will explore how Benkler's focus on culture in particular provides a continuity with aspects of Marcuse's and Jameson's discussions of critical culture which we have already discussed, but we should note more broadly that Benkler emphasizes how the ways in which information, culture and knowledge
110 Benkler, Wealth, 8. '"Benkler, Wealth, 1.
59 "are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done."
Benkler gives an account of the development of the networked information economy, showing how it has emerged from two shifts that have occurred over roughly the last 150 years. This first of these we have already discussed: the move to an information economy, based on information and cultural production, in many of the most developed countries in the world. Benkler describes this shift vividly in a stylized account of the concentration and commercialization of the production and distribution of information and culture in the mass media.113 The process began with the development of newspapers from local, small-circulation enterprises to mass media enterprises designed to reach larger and more dispersed audiences. This was made possible by the development of the telegraph and high-volume printing presses.
As new technology was developed, this basic model of mass broadcast and distribution across social and geographic distances was adopted by other media in the information and cultural production and exchange industry: radio, television, cable and satellite communications, as well as the film and music industries. The economics of this system drove it to expand as well. High up front costs associated with production and infrastructure are offset by the low marginal costs of distribution; the more people you can sell these outputs - information, films, television series, music - too, the higher the profit margin. Cultural and information production industries become focused on producing many copies of a few cultural artifacts and distributing
112 Benkler, Wealth, 1. 113 See Benkler, Wealth, 29-34.
60 them widely. Large-scale distribution and administrative networks have led to centralized control over the means of information and cultural production and exchange - sources of political and economic power in an industrial information economy.
The second shift Benkler identifies occurred much more recently, and its full scope and effect are not yet apparent. But it has already precipitated the move to the networked information economy. This development is a shift in the network architecture of the information and cultural economy, specifically the creation and expansion of the Internet. This has changed the media environment from a "hub-and- spoke architecture with unidirectional links to the end points in the mass media, to distributed architecture with multidirectional connections among nodes."114 The radical departure that this development represents stems from the basic fact that "it is the first modern communication medium that expands its reach by decentralizing the capital structure of production and distribution of information, culture and knowledge."115 The physical means of information and cultural production, which in an industrial information economy are highly centralized because of their cost, are in the networked information economy often owned by the end users. Not only that, but the means of distribution are also much more highly diffused. In effect, the production and distribution or exchange of information, knowledge and culture has become available to anyone with a personal computer and Internet connection - a staggering shift from the highly centralized industrial information economy. In an information economy, in which the "basic output that has become dominant...is
114 Benkler, Wealth, 212. 115 Benkler, Wealth, 30.
61 human meaning and communication," this represents a powerful transition.
Because of the low cost of becoming a speaker in the social conversation a significant portion of the world's population can afford to enter the networked environment as producers and distributors. When we combine these facts - the new centrality of information, knowledge and culture in the most advanced economies, and the astonishing decline in cost of the means of producing and exchanging these 'goods' - we are confronted with a new, unfamiliar, and still emerging social and economic condition.117
When he wrote in 2006, Benkler estimated that roughly a billion people living in developed countries had cheap, ubiquitous access to the Internet, and this number has likely grown since.118 Performing some approximate calculations he estimates these one billion people have somewhere between two and six billion spare hours every day. This is between three and eight and a half times the number of hours worked by the entire combined workforce of 340,000 people employed by the motion picture and recording industries in the United States, assuming they all worked forty- hour weeks, fifty-two weeks a year. The sheer amount of information and culture that can be generated by these one billion is staggering, and one has only to browse the
Internet to see that this is the case. Benkler goes on to argue that
[bjeyond the sheer potential quantitative capacity, however one wishes to discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience. They have diverse interests - as diverse as human culture itself.119
116 Benkler, Wealth, 32. 117 Benkler, Wealth, 56. 118 Benkler, Wealth, 55. 1,9 Benkler, Wealth, 55.
62 This quote speaks to the motivation of people engaging in the direct and varied sort of cultural conversation made possible by the Internet, which draws a further distinction between the information and cultural production of the networked information society and the earlier industrial information society. In the latter the primary motivation is driven by the market and profit, meaning that information, knowledge and culture produced and distributed through this system have as one of their core features a concern for the market viability and profitability of the goods.
Benkler notes that in the networked information economy we are beginning to see a new set of motivations that drive people to produce and exchange knowledge and information. An host of nonmarket motivations - curiosity, interest, hobby, religious expression, compassion, activism, community and network building, to name a few possibilities - have become central to the production and exchange of these goods; the diversity of human interest, knowledge and creativity becomes readily apparent - and examples of this are accessible literally at the fingertips of all the users of the network.120 A simple search of the Internet, using an engine such as
Google, reveals this to be the case. As well, there is a new modality of nonmarket oriented production: peer production, which has become a powerful and prolific way to produce information, knowledge and culture, rivalling the productive capacity of
This is not to suggest that the Internet provides an environment completely free from market forces and motivations, because clearly it does not. But it does provide a powerful forum to share knowledge and information in a context that is not driven so fundamentally by market forces. 121 Benkler demonstrates this using "Viking ships" as his search term. The results are illustrative of the profound changes in cultural production and exchange that have become possible through the Internet: the first several sites are based in geographically dispersed locations, and include a museum, a site dedicated to essays about essays and resources on Viking ships, and commercials site selling nautical replicas. See Benkler, Wealth, 53.
63 the for-profit corporation, which is the quintessential productive and distributive agent of the industrial information economy.122
The peer production model, which seems to run counter to common understandings of rational economic behaviour - represents the collective efforts of volunteers, numbering into the thousands on some peer produced products, the outputs of which are distributed freely. One of the best examples of this is Wikipedia,
"the most serious online rival to the Encyclopaedia Britannica" written by tens of thousands of volunteers, who then turn around and give it away for free.123 While many question the credibility of Wikipedia as a source of information - its openness, which is one of its greatest strengths, is also a significant weakness in this regard - its growth and scope since its creation in 2001 demonstrate the power of online peer production: it now contains more than 10 million articles in 250 languages (over 2 million in English alone). Another excellent example of peer production is the development of free, open-source software such as the Linux operating system. These examples are demonstrative of how peer production presents a radical challenge to market-based production models. It is "radically decentralized, collaborative, and non-proprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands."125
Benkler does not think that nonmarket production of this type will completely replace market production; but as it emerges as a new mode of production, it will
122 Benkler, Wealth, 161-62. 123 Benkler, Wealth, 5. 124 "Wikipedia: About," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.Org/wiki/Wikipedia:About (accessed May 23, 2008. 125 Benkler, Wealth, 60. challenge market production in some areas. Nonmarket cultural production and exchange is increasingly becoming an alternative to market production, "based on the fact that it is displacing the particular industrial form of information and cultural production of the twentieth century."
Benkler is clear that his observations about the development of the networked information economy, and the possibilities it presents for freedom and a critical culture, do not constitute a Utopian vision of the Internet's potential. Rather,
[i]t is a practical possibility that directly results from our economic understanding of information and culture as objects of production. It flows from fairly standard economic analysis applied to a nonstandard economic reality: one in which all the means of producing and exchanging information and culture are placed in the bands of hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of people around the world, available for them to work with not only when they are functioning in the market to keep body and soul together, but also, with equal efficacy, when they are functioning in society and alone, trying to give meaning to their lives as individuals and social beings.127
In discussing society and culture, Benkler gives more attention to the individual, one of the core categories of liberal political theory, than do Marcuse and
Jameson. His view of the power of culture and society over the individual is more constrained than for our other two theorists; however, he argues forcefully that liberal political theory needs to take account of the effects of culture on individuals and the political, because failure to do so "disables [liberal] political theory from commenting on central characteristics of a society and its institutional frameworks."128 Liberal political theory needs to find a way to balance the challenges to individual agency posed by culture, because while "[c]ulture.. .is not destiny... [i]t is the frame of
Benkler, Wealth, 293. Benkler, Wealth, 34. Benkler, Wealth, 276.
65 meaning from within which we must inevitably function and speak to each other, and whose terms, constraints, and affordances we always negotiate." He recognizes that culture exerts immense force on how we perceive the state of our world, what we can say to each other, how we can say it, and how it will be interpreted and received.
Benkler recognizes the important role culture plays in how we perceive our world, how we act in it, and how we communicate with others; to bring it back to his core liberal concerns, it plays a role in how "freedom and justice are perceived, conceived and pursued," for him.130 Understanding the influence of culture in this way, of course it matters how it is produced. The dominant role of Hollywood and the recording industry in the United States during the twentieth century, as central hubs of cultural production in the industrial information economy, becomes problematic for Benkler in a similar way that it is for Marcuse and Jameson: centralized, market- oriented cultural production that dominates cultural discourse, imposing shared images and symbols that we use to frame our world and act within it. We should note too, that this is similar to the account of domination and power given by Lukes.
Benkler sees the networked information economy as providing a chance to move beyond this hegemonic cultural sphere, through the decentralization of cultural production and exchange. We will end this chapter with a discussion of the implications of this decentralization of this production across a diffuse network.
Immanent Critique In "Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory: Its Origins and
Developments in Hegel, Marx and Contemporary Thought" by Robert Antonio, we
129 Benkler, Wealth, 282. 130 Benkler, Wealth, 274. have a clear articulation of critical theory, as well as its methodological core, immanent critique.
Focusing on the Marxist foundation of critical theory, Antonio characterizes it as "an historically applied logic of analysis rather than a fixed theoretical or empirical content."131 That is, the core of 'critical theory' does not have a unified, coherent articulation, other than its methodological core - its 'applied logic of analysis'. While adopting Marxist categories of historical analysis and criticism, which can be applied ahistorically, critical theorists reject Marxism-Leninism and similar interpretations of
Marxism which rely upon optimistic conceptions of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat and blind faith in the emancipatory potential of technology. Thus, critical theory finds fault with capitalism, as well as with state socialism when the latter leads to the construction of a state-bureaucracy which positions itself in a relation of domination to society, using the pseudo-scientific rationalization of production as a legitimation, which only serves to further mystify the true character of the relations of domination.133 Immanent critique actualizes the conceptual approach of critical theory, harnessing its analytic categories as "a means of detecting the societal contradictions which offer the most determinate possibilities for emancipatory social change."134
Critical theorists argue that there are more subtle forms of domination being exerted today, under the current capitalist system. For critical theorists:
1,1 Robert Antonio, "Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory: Its Origins and Developments in Hegel, Marx and Contemporary Thought," British Journal of Sociology 32:3 (1981), 330. ''2 Antonio, "Immanent Critique," 337. ''" Antonio, "Immanent Critique," 337. 134 Antonio, "Immanent Critique," 332.
67 the contradictions of capitalism shift from the rude material privation of workers, to a dialectic involving depoliticization, over- administration, waste, environmental destruction and other consequences of the rationalization of the arbitrary power of capital. 5
As we noted in our section on Marcuse above, this domination is much less obvious than under the capitalism that Marx was familiar with; the change means that workers have been to some extent 'bought-off. At least in the developed world, technical progress has made possible the conditions of life much more comfortable for the average citizen, so that the sharp divide between classes is no longer so sharply felt.
In addition to this re-articulation of the nature of class domination in the current capitalist system, critical theory has had to deal with the spectacular failure of
Marxism to realize emancipation through communism. Bureaucratic state socialism has proven to be inadequate in providing for the emancipation of the working classes envisaged by Marx, and thus critical theory stands as much in opposition to this sort of system as to exploitative capitalist ones.
The problem which critical theory confronts here is rooted in Marx's optimism for the natural emancipatory potential of the proletariat, which was supposed to bring history to its end of freedom and rationality. This account seems far-fetched today, and worse, this "promise of emancipation, 'insured' by the advance of science and technology under the guidance of the 'workers' state', legitimates cultural, political and social repression," as we saw in many socialist states.136
The departure of critical theory from Marx is linked to the latter's grounding in an Enlightenment concept of rationality: instrumental reason. The absolute reason that had been a source of legitimation for the repression of the working classes under
135 Antonio, "Immanent Critique," 337. 136 Antonio, "Immanent Critique," 337.
68 early capitalism was seen by Enlightenment thinkers as the root of many of the problems facing humanity. Horkheimer refers to this as 'objective reason' in Eclipse of Reason, where he says that:
This view asserted the existence of reason as a force not only in the individual mind but also in the objective world.... It aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims. The degree of reasonableness of a man's life could be determined by its harmony with this totality.
The Enlightenment sought to free humanity, through instrumental reason, from the needs and privations imposed by nature, and from the forms of social domination that were legitimated using absolute/objective reason. Instrumental reason thus is a rationality based on simple questions of means, not ends, focused on the process of getting a desired result or outcome, without bothering with the question of whether this outcome was itself reasonable. Enlightenment thinkers were of the view that this type of reason would both help to free humanity from forms of domination imposed by the use if absolute reason, and help humanity realize greater domination over nature, thereby bettering its condition.
While instrumental reason has served to make the conditions of material life more comfortable, it has proven inadequate in alleviating humanity from need and allowing us to attain freedom from domination. A core theoretical contention of critical theory is that instrumental reason has in fact been faulty in this regard, leading to the continual creation of new socially imposed needs and institutions (second nature) as we become farther removed from the needs imposed by nature. This is one theoretical foundation on which there is widespread agreement amongst major critical thinkers. David Held notes in Introduction to Critical Theory that
1,7 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 4. Horkeimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, for example agreed with Weber that the emergence of instrumental reason led to disenchantment (particularly after the Enlightenment).... They shared Weber's view as to the probability of the continuing expansion of rationalization and bureaucratization....The extension of formal means-ends rationality to the 'conduct of life' becomes a concern as a form of domination: means becoming ends, social rules becoming reified objectifications commanding directions.138
Instrumental reason has allowed humanity to increase tremendously its domination of nature, but at the cost of extending new forms of social control. It encourages the categorization of the world in means-ends terms, so that patterns of rational thought conceptualize everything in the world in terms of a means-ends relation. Everything becomes an object to be manipulated. This view of the world extends to how we conceptualize society and other human subjects. Domination and repression of the self and others emerge and are perpetuated as instrumental reason structures relations within society.
The failure of the Enlightenment to deliver on its central goal of the creation of a free and rational society can be attributed to the unfettered use of instrumental reason in the pursuit of this goal. Critical theory retains the Enlightenment ideals of emancipation and rationality, and uses this as a standard to frame its critiques of both capitalism and repressive state socialism. Antonio articulates this when he says that,
"as an immanent critique of domination, the truth of critical theory lies in neither absolute nor instrumental reason, but in the determinate negation of domination."139
The immanent nature of this critique springs from the stark contradiction between modern, democratic capitalist societies' roots in emancipatory Enlightenment ideology, and the persistence of forms of domination within many of these societies,
L'8 David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (London: Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1980), 65-66. 139 Antonio, "Immanent Critique," 340.
70 which structure social configurations and constrain individual autonomy and creativity. The tensions that arise from this disconnect between ideology and reality provide the conditions for change to come about through a dialectical process. Critical theory seeks to provide a progressive, emancipatory direction for this change.
Immanent critique is a method of analysis that allows us to identify "the societal contradictions which offer the most determinate possibilities for emancipatory social change. [Further, this] commentary on method cannot be separated from its' historical application, since the content of immanent critique is the dialectic in history."
Culture and Critique
Marcuse, Jameson, and Benkler all offer critical accounts of culture. For
Marcuse the aesthetic and creative aspects at the core of our humanity are structured by social relations that have their roots in the rationalization of and alienation from our labour, and a socially imposed second nature of created needs and repressive institutions. To create a critical culture we need the creative, life-affirming side of our nature - a new sensibility - grounded in productive forces beyond efficiency, rationality, marketability, and profit, which are the primary productive forces of capitalism. Culture, to have a critical aspect, must have a critical distance from capitalist society; it must have a space uncolonized by the means-ends rationality of capitalist society. Finding such a space to engage the new sensibility, to move beyond the contradictions of capitalism, is problematic for Marcuse.
Such a move is even more problematic for Jameson - indeed, he seems not to consider this as a possibility. Under late capitalism culture has become completely
140 Antonio, "Immanent Critique," 332.
71 subsumed under capital; there is no space for critical distance within society, because cultural production is already totally commodified. Culture has become coextensive with society; conversely, society has undergone a total aestheticization. Commodified cultural and aesthetic production are the chief means through which we mediate social meaning, and understand our world and what is possible.
This need not be the end of critical theory though; immanent critique still exposes the contradictions of capitalist society. There is hope of genuine progress in society, whereby conditions of domination are lessened, and we can hope to move towards freedom. Immanent critique does not require a critical distance; on the contrary, an attempt to find such a critical distance, to place oneself outside of the dialectic of history as it unfolds through the late capitalist era, would, even were it possible according to the cultural logic of late capitalism, be a mistake. In order to adequately give a critique of capitalism, and to move from that critique to praxis, we must be fully imbedded in it, aware of the contradictions from which change will arise. This then, is the full measure of Jameson's postmodern sublime - to become fully aware of the new global space of society as it has been determined by capitalism, to find those many contradictions inherent in its domination and repression of humanity, and from there, from within the totalizing sphere of capital, to find a way for individuals and society to be free. This will be a cultural form of immanent critique - the development of new modality of cultural production that gives individuals greater agency and freedom.
This is where Benkler's articulation of the networked information economy, and its social and cultural possibilities - grounded on the decentralized, nonmarket
72 driven production and exchange of information, knowledge and culture - becomes significant. Though couched in very different language than Marcuse uses to describe a non-market space where individuals can engage the new sensibility, Benkler's networked information economy does have some strong parallels. Marcuse held out the hope that creativity and technology, when freed from their ties to market driven production, would offer a move beyond the repression and domination of advanced industrial society. The emerging non-market motivated production and exchange of information, knowledge, and culture provides such a possibility. The development of networked society, and the decentralization of production and exchange, can be couched as an immanent response to the totalizing, de-centering space of global capital that Jameson identifies as the central characteristic of the postmodern historical moment. The technology developed by advanced economies (which engender alienation, and de-centring of the subject) has allowed for the realization of new modes of a networked society which is in the process of giving rise to an alternate mode of production - peer produced, decentralized, and based on the creativity and interests of billions of individuals. A new historical moment is emerging: networked late capitalism.
Of course, we must be careful not to overstate the degree to which the networked information economy represents a move beyond the dynamics of capitalist society. The cultural and social dominant of our time is still the one offered by
Jameson - one in which global capital shapes social and cultural space to a great degree. And much of the user-generated cultural content on the Internet appears alongside, or in contexts produced by the industrial information economy. But
73 technology, and the possibilities it offers for non-market oriented cultural production, are creating the conditions in which we can rearticulate and reshape our understanding of cultural and social space, and perhaps achieve some break from the domination of the advanced industrial economies and the centralized production of information, knowledge and culture under the industrial information economy. The emergent networked late capitalist society is creating a social space in which huge numbers of geographically dispersed individuals can form new social networks and collectively produce information and cultural content.
And of course we cannot ignore the fact that this conclusion really speaks only to cultural production and exchange on the Internet. There is still a large non-network aspect to the late capitalist economy, and this is not likely to change. As well, a great deal of internet traffic and content is also focused on for-profit enterprise, and much of the infrastructure that allows us access (e.g., Internet service providers, or ISPs) is as well. There are two responses we might raise to these objections. First, according to Jameson, in late capitalism all production is cultural production, because of the
"prodigious expansion of culture through the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life...can be said to have become 'cultural.'"141 So even these for-profit components of the Internet are in some sense cultural. Second, and more importantly, because culture shapes our understanding of the world and the limits of the possible, the ways and means that individuals have to engage in cultural production are very important to the boundaries of human freedom. The Internet, by giving us an architecture for de-centralized, non-market cultural production and exchange thus provides a space in which we can collectively shape our understanding
141 Jameson, Postmodernism, 48.
74 of the world, and its possibilities. Where this potential is most seriously challenged is in state censorship of the Internet content that citizens can view (though this is a difficult task given the diffuse nature of the architecture and content of the Internet), and by virtue of the fact that it is subject to social and economic realities imposed by the for-profit nature of late capitalism (we can see this evident in traffic shaping by
ISPs). This returns us to a point we noted briefly at the beginning of our discussion at
Benkler, but which bears emphasis. The struggle over what Benkler calls the
"institutional ecology of the digital environment" is of great importance, because
"[n]o benevolent historical force will inexorably lead this technological-economic moment to develop toward an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium."142 We cannot sit idly by and hope that the "industrial giants of yore" take the decentralization of the production and exchange of cultural, knowledge, and information that challenges their hold on the economic structures of our society; developments in
[technology will not overcome their resistance through an insurmountable progressive impulse. The reorganization of production and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice will emerge, therefore, only as a result of social and political action aimed at protecting the new social patterns from the incumbents' assaults.143
I4i Benkler, Wealth, 22. 143 Benkler, Wealth, 23.
75 Chapter 3: Space and Identity
Breaking new ground by breaking new sound. - CBC Radio 3 tagline'44
We're going to do a song that you've never heard before, Or maybe you have. Regardless, I want y'all to make some noise right now. Yeah, this is the Joyful Rebellion. Yeah, check it out. -K-os, "ClapUr Handz"145
This chapter will examine various questions related to culture, identity, place and music in Canada in the emerging space of networked late capitalism. The goal is to illustrate some of the social and cultural conditions under which Canadian youth form their political and cultural identity. In the last chapter, we gave an articulation of the emerging socio-cultural dominant: networked late capitalism. This chapter looks at some of the more specific aspects of the socio-cultural moment of today's youth in
Canada. This discussion will lead us back to the issue with which we began this thesis
- the nature of youth political (dis)engagment in Canada, and how it is related to social and cultural space.
We begin with a lengthier discussion of the role of culture and aesthetics as a means of non-traditional political participation, looking specifically at how such
144 CBC Radio 3, CBC Radio 3, http://radio3.cbc.ca (accessed May 26, 2008). 145 K-os, "Clap Ur Handz," Joyful Rebellion, 2004, CD.
76 forms of participation function, and why they are important in networked late capitalist Canada. We will first return to Jameson, and his account of culture and the aesthetic in late capitalism, drawing on elements of Benkler's networked information economy to re-position Jameson in networked society.
Culture and Subject-hood in Networked Late Capitalism
Jameson describes his account of cultural politics as an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping."146 This is a cultural politics that allows us to re-orient ourselves within the space of multinational capital. He finds the term 'mapping' applicable for two reasons. First, because he compares the process he speaks of to process whereby individuals locate themselves in the bewildering urban environments of modern cities, in which we manage to orient ourselves despite the difficulty of grasping the city as a totality. There is a process of cognitive mapping at work here, which allows us to navigate through the physical space of cities by compiling a subjective, mimetic representation of the actually unrepresentable total.
Also, there is a parallel between re-orienting ourselves in our new social reality and the way that map making has developed as a method of representing the world. There are difficulties in representing the physical features of the world, and it is clear that no map can ever hope to give literal representation of these features; a good one will at best be a similitude. And different types of maps use different modes of representation, which can of course have political consequences; how we represent the world affects how we act in it. This corresponds to our inability to give a literal, neutral representation of the space of global capital. We cannot orient ourselves in
146 Jameson, "Postmodernism," 51.
77 terms of social class, nor in a strict international or national context; in short we cannot existentially locate ourselves through a representation of the space of multinational capital. Cognitive mapping would be the method whereby we create a model of political culture, one "which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system," using art and culture
(the aesthetic).147
With the subsumption of society under capital, all cultural production has become grounded in the commodity form. There is no aesthetic or cultural work that has not already always been a commodity in late capitalism by virtue of its creation within the structures of total capital. All cultural production has been instrumentalized, following the logic of capitalism. We can understand this relationship conversely as well; not only is the aesthetic affected by its integration into the commodity world of capitalism, it also "implies that everything in consumer society has taken on an aesthetic dimension."148
This is a good point to mention again the nature of culture in late capitalism, as not simply produced, but re-produced. It is repetitive, but each repetition speaks to the era in which it takes shape through the introduction of variations in form, style and content into the re-imaginings of older styles, forms and texts, re-presenting these elements in a new context. While the structure of capital often determines their use and exchange-value (that is, their instrumental, and monetary value), what cultural products are, say and mean, and how they are expressed and interpreted is not
Jameson, Postmodernism, 54. Jameson, "Reification," 126.
78 necessarily wholly determined by the domination, manipulation and repression that are features of capitalist society.
Much of contemporary cultural production has a manipulative function which plays a part in social domination and repression through "the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony."149 Jameson demonstrates this through a discussion of Jaws, and the first two parts of The Godfather trilogy.150 It is simply important for us to note that he ties a critical, Utopian element into such repressive and manipulative exercises. This
Utopian moment can be a means of further manipulation, used to draw us into the narrative, and give us feelings of resolution, and hope, to help us celebrate the re affirmation of the status quo within society, as protagonists triumph over enemies of prevailing society and prevailing social values. Jameson argues that such Utopian elements are often present in mass cultural products. He says that
we cannot fully do justice to the ideological function of works like this [that is, works of mass culture] unless we are willing to concede the presence within them of a more positive function as well: of what I will call, following the Frankfurt School, their Utopian or transcendent potential - that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass culture which remains implicitly, no matter how faintly, negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity, it springs.151
Marcuse argues that this Utopian element of art, what he calls its 'affirmative character' is linked to "the commitment of art to Eros, the deep affirmation of the Life
Instincts in their fight against instinctual and social oppression." And this, taken with the earlier assertion that what art and cultural production say and mean, though
Jameson, "Reification," 138. 150 Jameson, "Reification," 138-147. 151 Jameson, "Reification," 142. 152 Marcuse, Aesthetic, 10-11.
79 formed in the space of capitalist society, need not be totally determined by this structure, allows us to see a genuine Utopian element in cultural production. Even in the era of late capitalism, culture has an emancipatory potential as a mode of immanent critique.
The emergence of a networked late capitalism allows for the space to recognize cultural products outside of the sphere of the instrumentalized logic of late capitalism as understood by Jameson. While late capitalism still forms the dominant cultural logic, individuals increasingly have the freedom to engage in the creation and exchange of information and culture alongside, or around, mass culture. Yes, these products are still created within the global space of late capitalism, but they are not necessarily products of the structures, actors, and institutions (i.e., multinational corporations and international regulatory regimes and bodies) that dominate this global space, as the products of mass culture are. As Benkler says,
The practical freedom of individuals to act and associate freely - free from the constraints of proprietary endowment, free from the constraints of formal relations of contract or stable organizations - allows individual action in an ad hoc, informal association to emerge as a new global mover. It frees the ability of people to act in response to all their motivations. In doing so, it offers a new path, alongside those of the market....'5
Culture becomes increasingly malleable in networked late capitalism; cultural production no longer only flows from centralized hubs out to an audience that has relatively few means to engage in the cultural conversation. Over the course of the twentieth century mass culture displaced folk culture, and individuals shifted from being primarily co-producers of culture to passive recipients.15 Jameson also makes
153 Benkler, Wealth, 355. 154 Benkler, Wealth, 296.
80 this point: that mass culture is produced for, but not by 'the people'.155 Networked cultural production has allowed for a reversal of this trend.
There are two features of the emerging cultural production system which are allowing for the emergence of a new folk culture, where many more individuals are active as cultural producers: transparency and malleability. 5 The range of results we get to search options on an engine such as Google demonstrates these traits of culture.
Using 'Barbie' as a search term, Benkler notes that contained within the top twenty results are sites which offer critiques of Barbie based on its promotion of a certain body image to young girls, and excessive consumerism.157 He goes on to analyze the way in which the 'Barbie' page on Wikipedia (currently the third hit on Google, after the U.S. and U.K. pages of Mattel, the maker of Barbie) discuses these controversies, and others related to the popular doll, as well as the historical development of the page.158 This example shows how the emergence of a networked social space "of individuals acting cooperatively as a major new source of defining transmissible statements and conversations about the meaning of culture, makes culture substantially more transparent and available for reflection, and therefore for revision."159 Culture becomes self-consciously writable and transmissible, as any individual with a personal computer and Internet connection can step into the cultural conversation.
The development of the networked information economy has also made culture more malleable by users. The development of the information economy saw
155 Jameson, "Reification," 128. 156 Benkler, Wealth, 15. 157 Benkler, Wealth, 285-287. 158 Benkler, Wealth, 287-292. 159 Benkler, Wealth, 293.
81 the cost of production and distribution driven up, but this trend is reversed in the networked information economy. Relatively cheap computers, and cheap, or even free peer developed software have brought production costs down. There is still some difference in production quality, to be sure, between a movie produced by Hollywood and one made by an individual using personal digital recording equipment and the editing capabilities of the personal computer. While the latter may still be cruder,
individuals nonetheless increasingly have the ability to take part in the cultural
conversation in this way, as well as to use this ability to take existing cultural
products and add their own twists. The new technology means "it is becoming
feasible for users to cut and paste, 'glom on,' to existing cultural materials; to
implement their intuitions, tastes, and expressions through media that render them
with newly acceptable degrees of technical quality, and to distribute them among
others, both near and far."160
This is not to say that everyone has the ability to become an artistic genius.
But not everyone need even be reasonably talented as a musician, filmmaker, or
writer to make this greater cultural exchange significant. The increased transparency
and malleability of culture does, arguably, make all those involved in this type of
production and exchange a better-informed consumer of culture, and a more critical
cultural participant, as the "ubiquitous practice of making cultural artifacts of all
forms enables individuals in society to be better readers, listeners and viewers of
professionally produced culture, as well as contributors... into this mix of collective
culture."161
lbU Benkler, Wealth, 296. 16lBenkler, Wealth,295.
82 These new cultural products are not formed outside of the global capitalist sphere, in some space uncolonized or uninhabited by the forces of capital. They are forms of immanent nonmarket production, arising from within the structures of capitalist society, that allow individuals to engage in cultural dialogue. In the form of subject-hood created under networked late capitalism we can see the de-centering of the subject which occurs on Jameson's account of late capitalism, as well as role for
Marcuse's articulation of radical subject, in which the individual is the basis for praxis. Jameson introduces the method of cognitive mapping as a way for the de- centered subject to orient him or herself in late capitalism; Marcusean aesthetics can play a role in this, as the affirmation of creative production in the struggle against social oppression. It is only by being fully grounded in our social reality, by becoming cognizant of it and orienting ourselves within it, by becoming active participants in cultural production and exchange, and becoming aware of forces of domination that may be at play, that we can hope to change it. This contention speaks to the heart of critical theory, to its basis in immanent critique. The manipulative, dominating and repressive elements of late capitalist society can only be overcome if we contextualize and locate the de-centered self within the disorienting, repressive structures of late capitalism and mass culture, finding the creative elements of our humanity, the liberating subjectivity of Marcuse, which exists in the social context of networked late capitalism. Such subjectivity, grounded in the inner history of individuals, "is not identical with this social existence. It is the particular history of their encounters, their passions, their joys and sorrows."162 Our subject-hood is conditioned by our social context, but also by our own individual histories and
162 Marcuse, Aesthetic, 5.
83 narratives. Even the de-centered subject is still such an individual. Our subject-hood in the postmodern era is immanent, in that we cannot hope to step back to some isolated subjectivity that is entirely discrete from the social context it exists in, disconnected from the world of exchange value of capitalism.
This immanent subjectivity is strengthened in networked late capitalism. The global space of capital, with its domination and manipulation, both in its subtle forms, as in Marcuse's 'democratic unfreedom,' and its more brutal and explicit forms, such as factory sweatshops, crushing poverty and war, with the temporal dislocation it engenders through the culture of commodity and simulacrum, and the spatial disorientation that is a result of its scope and scale, cannot annihilate this. To be sure the space of global capitalism is a de-centering one, and it creates the experience of cultural schizophrenia which Jameson identifies, but, just as the liberated society which critical theory hopes humanity can move towards cannot hope to allay all forms of conflict, and guarantee total freedom and happiness for all at all times, late capitalism cannot with its vast and pervasive reach do away with our subject-hood entirely.
During the expansion of the space of global capital under late capitalism, the
(mainly) uni-directional flow of culture and information to (mainly) passive audience was institutionalized by market and technological structure. The global reach of capital was brought forcefully to the local, and one result was the de-centering of the subject in the face of the new bewildering cultural milieu. The emergence of networked late capitalism brings with it the possibility for the individual to use new technology and connectedness to re-centre this fragmented subject-hood by engaging
84 in cultural production and dialogue. We referenced Jameson earlier to make this point: that the role of cultural dialogue in networked late capitalism is to
hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say to its fundamental object - the world of multinational capital - at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain our capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.163
The process of orientation, of cognitive mapping, takes place as part of the discursive production of social reality. This will be cultural production; the subject orients herself through acts of aesthetic and cultural creation and production, using these as a means to locate herself as a subject within the space of multinational capital. It is almost a (re)creation of subject-hood; having always already been a de-centered subject, adrift without in the space of late capital, the subject engages, through the creative process, in the production of a social reality in which we can orient ourselves. Using cultural content the subject has a language to communicate with, to engage others and the established order with. This language does not belong entirely to the forces of domination within society; its is (re)created by billions of individuals taking part in the cultural dialogue.
Before moving on, it is important to note how this discussion of culture and networked late capitalism, which was developed over the last two chapters, bears upon the central question of this thesis: the nature of youth political (dis)engagement in Canada. The account of networked late capitalism we have developed, in which the collapse of culture wholly into the social sphere of late capitalism (or the complete
161 Jameson, "Postmodernism," 54.
85 aestheticization of society), followed by the decentralization of the production and exchange of information, knowledge, and culture, describes the era in which the current generation of Canadian youth have grown up. In order to understand how
Canadian youth confront their social world, and choose to engage (or not) in it politically, we need to understand them in the context of the development of late capitalism into networked late capitalism. The struggle of the immanent subject to re orient him or herself in the space of global capital, now given traction by the emergent networked society, is the struggle of Canadian youth as they try to figure out how to engage politically with the world they have grown up in. We should add that this struggle need not be, in fact probably often is not, conscious.
Place, Region and Identity
The conception of subject-hood discussed above - the struggle of the de- centred subject to orient him or herself in the space of global capital - is the macro aspect of our cultural subject-hood. Our sense of agency and self, our subject-hood or identity is multiply determined. The above section describes our struggle for subject-hood in the space of global capital. Mass media, including the Internet, in expanding the space of our social world, shrinks the distance between us and distant events and places, bringing them into our everyday lives.165 This is how the space of global capital plays such a strong role in our processes of identity formation.
164 In this section we will at times use the terms 'subject-hood' and 'identity' interchangeably, but we should acknowledge that they are not the same. Subject-hood speaks more closely to aspects of our agency, while identity refers to social demarcations that we use to differentiate ourselves from others. The two are used interchangeably here because the two concepts bleed into each other in course of our discussion. Subject-hood, our agency characteristics in the space of global capital, are in part determined by processes of cultural production and exchange that we engage in in networked late capitalism, which can also determine socially grounded identity characteristics. 165 Nicholas J. Entrikin, "Place and Region," Progress in Human Geography 18, no. 2 (1994), 228. Despite the power and scope of the space of global capital in determining our social context, there are other social contexts which are just as important in understanding our sense of identity: place and region. In contrast to the vast space of late capitalism (which is we can now more easily map and navigate in the emergent era of networked late capitalism), place and region play just as concrete a role in determining our social context, in helping us to answer the question "Who am I?" through the answers to the questions "Where am I? and "Where do I belong?"166
The identification with location can occur at different levels; for instance, an individual can identify with Canada, Western Canada, British Columbia, or
Vancouver. Further, these identifications are not mutually exclusive. We can posses multiple identities because though they are applied to, or exercised by, individuals; they are socially constructed, and actualized differently on different spatial scales.
Identities are worn multiply, and different identities are (de)emphasized in different social contexts, both by individuals, or as a feature of the social context in which they find themselves.167 This understanding of identity as "actualized in many ways on several (spatial) scales - not just as neat divisions - so that one site of the construction of difference can act as the unmarked background for another," is particularly salient in Canada, with its strong provinces, regional identities, and cultural, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity.168
Separating our individual self-identity and social identity is difficult, if not impossible, because these two coincide: our individual stories or identities are
166 Lee Cuba and David Hummon, "A Place to Call Home: Identification with Dwelling, Community, and Region," Sociological Quarterly 34 (1993): 111-31. 167 Bristow, Next West, 9-15. 168 Anssi Paasi, "Region and Place: Regional Identity in Question," Progress in Human Geography 27, no. 4 (2003): 476.
87 embedded in the identities or stories of the communities from which we acquire
them.169 Individuals, identities, and societies do not exist independent of one another.
Narrations of individual and collective identity occur in the context of society.
We have seen how culture in networked late capitalism becomes a dialogue
created by all those individuals engaged in cultural production and exchange. Culture
is a collective narration - as are place and region. This narration plays a role in the
construction, and in the space of late capitalism, the survival of place (as well as
identity) and region. The space of global capitalism is universal, while place is
particular and subjective - unique, like personality - and often grounded in region.
Under the totalizing space of late capitalism there is a concern that the latter will lead
to the erosion, even obliteration of place and region. However, just as collective
narration of culture involves creating a networked cultural space in which individuals
can orient themselves, and become more skilled 'readers' of mass produced culture,
as well as cultural producers themselves, narrative plays a role in the production of
place and region.170
Anssi Paasi links the narrative of place to our individual life stories, while
articulating region as constructions based on collective social and cultural narratives,
and hence a setting for the individual construction of place. Place is constructed
through individual experience occurring in the unique web of social, physical, and
cultural connections of a given individual, often in different geographic locations.
Understood thus,
Place is not reduceable [sic] to a specific locality, 'site', or scale, or specific attributes connected with these (physical or built environment,
l69Nicholas J. Entrikin, "Place and Region 2," Progress in Human Geography 20 , no. 2 (1996): 217. 170 Nicholas J. Entrikin, "Place and Region 3," Progress in Human Geography 21, no. 2 (1997): 265.
88 culture, social relations). Instead, it is composed of situated episodes of life history which unavoidably have 'geographical' dimensions: real, imagined or Utopian. In a modern society characterized by an all- pervading social and spatial mobility, the episodes of one's life history increasingly take place in several locations, which thus become constituents of one's place.171
Place is understood as the spatial dimension of individual life stories, but it need not be linked to one specific location. Place plays a crucial role in the development of identity, providing an immediate spatial element to individual identity.
Paasi defines region as the spatial context in which we can understand place.
Place is defined individually and subjectively based on the specific narrative of an individual identity. Region is a social and cultural category, that has an "explicitly collective dimension" which reflects the institutions and history of the region.172
Region also differs from place in that a region is connected to a location, whereas place, on Paasi's definition, can include more than one location. Regions are framed by inhabitants and outsiders in terms of structures of expectations, which are comprised of mythical, imagined, and real features of a region. Regional identities
can stretch across spatial scales, as we noted above, so a region might be Canada, one
(or more) of its provinces, or something smaller, down to the local level. The
narrative of a given regional identity is formed by a variety of factors, including
"ideas on nature, landscape, the built environment, culture/ethnicity, dialects,
economic success/recession, periphery/centre relations, marginalization, stereotypic
images of a people community, both of'us' and 'them', actual/invented histories,
171 Anssi Paasi, "Deconstructing Regions: Notes on the Scales of Spatial Life," Environment and Planning A 23, no. 2 (1991): 248. 172 Paasi, "Deconstructing," 249.
89 Utopias and diverging arguments on the identification of people."173 From these factors regional identity is mediated into life through social and cultural practices, events and exchanges. It is socially and culturally produced, and reproduced. Such regional narrations lead to the construction of regionalism and nationalism (identities anchored to the region and nation).174 As Edward Said famously observed, "nations themselves are narrations." Stories, cultural products and narratives are the fundamental currency of identity, whether national/regional, or linked through these to the individual and place.
In this characterization of region and place, region can play a mediating role between the individual place and the space of global capital. It provides a socially, culturally, and historically grounded context in which identity is formed, one that is physically immediate in a way that the space of global capital is not. Because our understanding and conceptions of space are socially and culturally constructed, space is linked to cultural production.
Music, Space, and Identity
We will discuss the relationship between space and culture with relation to music. Of the possible forms of cultural production through which we might examine this connection, it is no accident that we have chosen to use music. Music has a very close relationship to space, as John Connell and John Gibson argue in Sound Tracks:
Popular Music, Identity, and Place:
Music is by nature geographic. Musical phrases have movement and direction, as though there are places in the music: quiet places and
173 Paasi, "Region and Place," 477. 174 Paasi, "Deconstructing," 249-50. 175 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Toronto: Random House, 1993), xiii.
90 noisy places, places that offer familiarity, nostalgia, a sense of difference, while the dynamism of music reflects changing lives. Sound is a crucial element in the world we construct for ourselves, and the world that others construct and impose on us.176
This outlines many links between music and space that will fit into our discussion: music and its reflection of space and region; its role in the construction of the socio- cultural world that forms the context for our identity, and the basis for our individual construction of place. Music and identity are discursive; music plays a role in the development of regional identity and place, and regional identity, and the place of individuals, influences the creation of music. Lyrics, as well as sonic and structural features of music reflect social and cultural space, region and place, and can mediate identity.177
As well, compared to other forms of cultural production, such as film and television, music is much cheaper to produce. In fact, a recent report on the state of
Canadian independent ('indie') music industry notes that "it is now possible to arrange, record and produce an album for less than $5,000, often from the comfort of your own home and almost anyone with a basic knowledge of technology can produce their own music/CD."178 And using digital technology, and the Internet, it can be easy to market through band sites, and others such as MySpace, and CBC
Radio 3, as well as distribute online. This makes music a comparatively cheap and easy cultural artifact to produce and distribute. And thus, it is a form with which it is relatively easy to enter the cultural conversation as a producer of culture, rather than
176 John Connell and Chris Gibson, Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity, and Place (New York: Routledge, 2003), 280. 177 John O'Flynn, "National Identity and Music in Transition: Issues of Authenticity in a Global Setting," in Music, Natioanl Identity, and the Politics of Location, 19-38 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 37. 178 Shelley Stein-Sacks, "The Canadian Independent Music Industry: An Examination of Disribution and Access," Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada (2006), 23.
91 simply a passive recipient. Add to this thriving live music scenes in most Canadian cities and growth in annual recordings, despite drops in CD sales, as well as a large number of Canadian indie labels (300) who account for an estimated 80% of all
Canadian releases in a year, and you get a picture a vital independent Canadian music scene.179 Finally, "the number of annual new recordings by Canadian artists has increased 63.3% from 1,261 in 1999 to 2,059 in 2003."
The importance of music as a mode of cultural expression for youth is hard to understate. Youth "are consuming enormous amounts of music - yes, consuming, acquiring, and living music. To them this is a ubiquitous part of their lives, always
1 CO present, seamless, as much a part of their being as breathing." Youth interaction with music extends far beyond the acquisition of albums in CD format; downloading and streaming music off websites, listening to internet radio, visiting band sites, discussing and sharing music online, finding out about bands and shows - these are the new modes of interaction with music, made possible by the Internet. And coupled with the ubiquity of small, portable music players such as Apple's perennially popular iPod, these developments have made music an ever-present aspect of the lives of the current generation of youth. Far more than other forms of cultural production, music is a feature of every day, day-to-day life.
In this section we will discuss the role of indie music in Canada on several levels. We will begin with a discussion of the band Broken Social Scene, which we can read as reflecting the space of networked late capitalism, as well as exemplifying a Canadian 'sound' that reflects the physical space of Canada. Second, we will 179 Department of Canadian Heritage, "The Canadian Music Industry: 2004 Economic Profile," Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada (2004), 15. 180 Stein-Sacks, "Canadian Independent," 21.
92 discuss the work of several other artists in relation to their link to region and place, understood in light of our discussion of Paasi, in Canada.
Broken Social Scene
Broken Social Scene, as the name hints has a rotating membership, though there are key members who are present for each project; indeed, "[t]o call BSS
[Broken Social Scene] a 'band' is to simplify matters drastically. It's more like a network."181 Some of these rotating and guest members have, or are exploring solo efforts or other collaborations. And some are even well established solo or collaborative artists in other Canadian groups, some of which may be familiar to the reader: k-os, Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan of the Stars, Emily Haines of Metric,
Leslie Feist, who records and performs under the name Feist, and Jason Collett, to name a few. One of the two founding members, Kevin Drew, has released a solo album featuring many members of the band, credited as "Broken Social Scene
Presents: Kevin Drew," and the other founding member, Brendan Canning, has a similarly credited project due to be released on July 22, 2008. The consequence of having a core group with a revolving cast of peripheral and guest performers, is that at any time the band will have a large membership in its studio efforts (between nine and seventeen members, depending who is available or needed to record), and perhaps more forcefully in its live performances, where there are often between twenty and thirty members who take the stage at various times.18
The name reflects both the nature of the band as a network of artists, as well as the dilemma of society in late capitalism - the threat capitalism poses to social
181 Allison Quart, "Guided by (Many, Many) Voices," New York Times, February 26, 2006. 182 Quart, "Guided."
93 cohesion, breaking down groups and thereby problematizing aesthetic expression, which has its basis in sociality. And the collaborative nature of its projects, especially the solo debuts of two core members (which still feature the rest of the group, but merely foreground the titled artist), mirrors the modality of cultural production that is emerging in networked late capitalism, where large numbers of individuals can become involved in the creation and exchange of cultural products, creating from their individual efforts a constantly evolving cultural narrative.
The membership of the group, and its powerful and surrealist music can be read as reflective of our socio-cultural moment in the emergent era of networked late capitalism. Their music has been described as "songs collapsing and whirling and thrumming with the energy of, well, an entire social scene."183 Compelling and often
complex instrumental elements, which interact to create a dynamic, solid, rush of
sound, and an often disproportionately soft vocal presence, in which the voice blends
with, is subsumed by instrument, and is often indistinct, evoke the plight of the de-
centered subject in the space of global late capitalism, and the schizophrenic
experience engendered by it. This is in contrast to the majority of popular music,
which features fairly standard front-and-centre vocals. In Broken Social Scene's
music, the vocals, given by several different members of the band, drift through the
all-encompassing backdrop of forceful instrumentalizations; we can hear the
disorientation of the subject in the vast social space of global capital. There are
moments where the vocals break through clearly and distinctly, where the subject has
through aesthetic effort found a way to orient him or herself, bursting across the space
l8"' Spencer Kornhaber, "A Crash Course in Broken Social Scene," North by Northwestern, May 22, 2008. of capital, exploding through it, in the process tempering the social reality and meeting resistance, engaging in a dialectic narrative of construction of social and cultural space. This reading of Broken Social Scene closely parallels Jameson's thoughts on political art:
the new political art (if it is possible) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object - the world space of multinational capital - at the same time as which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain our capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.1 4
An alternative reading of the work of Broken Social Scene can see it mirroring the geographic reality of Canada, and the spatial dispersion of its people. This reading initiates a further (interesting) observation, namely, that the distribution of the
Canadian population - concentrated in a few, relatively physically small regions of the country (cities and greater metropolitan areas), surrounded by vast open spaces - in a way also mirrors the dilemma of the de-centred subject in late capital. Canadian society, largely geographically fragmented, contends with tripartite challenges to our national subject-hood: 1) the great spaces separating us; 2) the imminent (and in some ways immanent) presence of a hegemonic socio-cultural mass at our border (a border along which the majority of this population is perched); and 3) the internally contested nature of the identity of Canada as a nation-state. The music of Broken
Social Scene can be read as corresponding especially to the first of these — Canada's vast open spaces, punctuated by population concentrations. On this reading the sonic and structural properties of the instrumentals play the role of space, while the more
Jameson, Postmodernism, 54.
95 delicate vocals reflect the dispersed population concentrations, which, especially when viewed on a map, seem to be swallowed by the space that separates them.
Region, Place and Canadian Indie Music
Music can play a role in producing, and reproducing regional identity.
Canadian indie music is an excellent example of this. In this section we will discus specific works by several artists in order to illustrate this point. Recall Paasi's assertion that regional identity is based on "ideas on nature, landscape, the built environment, culture/ethnicity, dialects, economic success/recession, periphery/centre relations, marginalization, stereotypic images of a people community, both of 'us' and 'them', actual/invented histories, Utopias and diverging arguments on the identification of people."185 The music discussed below makes reference to many regional identities within Canada, using these elements.
In the creation of the experience of place within individual life stories, specific locations - regions (on a number of spatial scales) - play an important role. Music, as a profoundly emotive medium, can link us to location by reference to many of the elements that are at play in the construction of regional identity. Inasmuch as the creation of any given place is, as Paasi argues, linked to one or more locations(s), music plays a role in the creation of place, by serving as a powerful medium for connection between collective narrations of regions and individual narrations of identity.
Paasi, "Region and Place," 477. "Your Rocky Spine" by Ontario's Great Lake Swimmers is, as they admit on their website, a song "inspired by Canada's majestic natural environment."186 The lyrics of this song, and their atmospheric folk rock sound in general, present the attitude of a lover languidly exploring his partner's body - which in this case is a natural landscape, easily imagined in the mind of the listener as the Canadian Shield.
"I was lost in the lakes/ and the shapes that your body makes/ that your body makes, that your body makes..." are the opening lines sung by Tony Dekker, Great Lake
Swimmers' singer/songwriter. The song conveys the sense of a landscape both rugged ("Floating over your rocky spine/ the glaciers made you/ and now you're mine," goes the chorus) and beautiful.188 It romanticizes the natural landscape of central Canada, and uses this image to form a connection between the listener and location.
"One Great City!" by the Weakerthans is an excellent example of a song that links to location through the built environment.189 This punk-folk band references the underground portions of the Winnipeg Sky walks ("A thousand sharpened elbows in the underground/ That hollow hurried sound, of feet on polished floor...") as well as
Winnipeg's economically distressed North End ("And up above us all/ leaning into sky/ our golden business boy/ will watch the North End die/ and sing 'I love this town'/ then let his arcing wrecking ball proclaim/ 'I hate Winnipeg'.").190 The vigoursly
Bio: Great Lake Swimmers, http://www.greatlakeswittimers.com/ (accessed May 25, 2008). Great Lake Swimmers, "Your Rocky Spine," Ongiara, 2007, CD. Great Lake Swimmer, "Rocky." Weakerthans, "One Great City!," Reconstruction Site, 2003, CD. Weakerthans, "One Great."
97 picked guitar, with its up-tempo yet folksy melody, is suggestive of a bustling city rising out of the prairie landscape.
Examples that reflect a host of elements that are linked to regional identity - economic success/struggle, centre/periphery status, and stereotypic images of a region's people - are found in two very different songs that reference, respectively, the Maritimes, and rural Western Canada: "The Maritimes" by the rapper Classified, and "Dead + Rural" by the Handsome Furs. Dan Boyd (aka Classified) wrote "The
Martimes" as a tribute to the region, but the inspiration for much of it is drawn from stereotypes - 'kitchen parties,' high gas prices, the consumption of Alexander Keith's and donairs, the ubiquity of lobster, to name a few that are referenced in the song.191
Boyd cites the presence of these elements as both a deliberate play on stereotypes of the Maritimes that are held "out west," and which he tries to dispel, but that he admits also hold some truth, and can be a source of pride for Maritimers.192 The song also makes reference to the image of the Maritimes as something of a cultural and economic backwater. This is all demonstrated by a brief quote:
Welcome to the east coast home of the innocent/ still pigeon-holed as a farmer or a fisherman./ No major league teams, baseball or hockey. /No urban radio, just country and pop beats./ I'm trying to shake these stereo types,/ so give me space please let me air out my life./1 don't even eat fish, shit I never tried lobster,/ Can't play the fiddle, and never i 193 was a logger....
"Dead + Rural," employing only guitar, vocals, and a steady, gritty, machine- produced drum beat, manages to sonically recreate the feeling of driving down a
191 Classified, "The Maritimes," Boy-Cott-ln the Industry, 2005, CD. 192 CBC Radio 3, "#134: Home for the Holidays: The Hometown Song Special," Podcast (December 14,2007). I9'' Classified, "Maritimes."
98 dusty, washboard logging road, while the title speaks to the increasingly peripheral status of rural Canada.194 The lyrics further enable this reading, as the song's narrator laments "I got friends there,/1 have friends there,/ wheels just spinning in the ground,/ wheels just spinning in the ground."195
No contemporary Canadian indie artist has woven themes related to location and place as thoroughly or intimately through their music as Joel Plaskett, an artist who "realizes the power of singing about place," and has been singing about Canada, and especially Halifax, since the 1990s.196 Plasket's latest album, Ashtray Rock, is more-or-less a tribute to teenage years spent growing up around Halifax.197 His music captures the experience of being young in, his evident affection for, and the spirit of,
Halifax, in songs like "Down at the Khyber,"198 "Love This Town,"199 and "Nowhere with You."200 With rolling, upbeat melodies and easy, engaging lyrics that are littered with reference to people and places in and around Halifax, the music feels as if it should be heard spilling from the doors and windows of the city's many pubs and bars
- as it often is. Plaskett's connection with Halifax as a powerful component of his narrative of place is evident: "Listen up kid,/ it's not what you think./ Stayed up too late,/ had a little too much to drink./ Walked home across the bridge/ when the
Marquee shut down,/ there's a reason that I love this town."201
14 Handsome Furs, "Dead + Rural," Plague Park, 2007, CD. Handsome Furs, "Dead + Rural." Much of this album can be read as playing on the rural/urban theme, both lyrically, and in its instrumental qualities, which bear similarity to "Dead + Rural." See especially "Sing! Captain," "Hearts of Iron," and "Handsome Furs Hate This City." 196 Radio 3, #134. 197 Joel Plaskett Emergency, Ashtray Rock, 2007, CD. 198 Joel Plaskett Emergency, "Down at the Khyber," Down at the Kyber, 2001, CD. 199 Joel Plaskett, "Love this Town," La De Da, 2005, CD. 200 Joel Plaskett Emergency, "Nowhere With You," Make a Little Noise DVD, 2006, CD Extra. 201 Plaskett, "Love this Town."
99 Not all songs that draw connection to location are positive. Several of the songs we discuss display a dislike for the location, or a characteristic of it - although despite this there is often an underlying fondness to be found within the song, or in the thoughts of the writer. John K. Samson of Weaktherthans expresses this sentiment when he comments about his hometown of Winnipeg that "you love it, but sometimes you hate it."202 This is in reference to his song "One Great City!," the title of which can be read as expressing a certain affection for Winnipeg;203 while the chorus of the song - "I hate Winnipeg" - is more an expression of (perhaps tongue in cheek) disenchantment with the city.204 Similarly, Dan Boeckner a native of Cowichan Lake,
BC - and now a member of two Montreal-based bands (Handsome Furs and Wolf
Parade) - described the Handsome Furs' song "Dead + Rural" which is about his hometown like this when he introduced it at shows: "This is a tune about the town I grew up in, and it sucked. It's called 'Dead + Rural.'"205 This frank introduction does not provide the full story, as Boeckner also admits that "I was really excited to move out of Cowichan Lake, originally, but with enough distance between living in
Cowichan Lake [sic], I really do feel nostalgic." The song itself ("Dead + Rural") displays this contradiction nicely, with a guitar riff that sounds like a triumphant tribute, but also lyrics that describe the town as "dead and rural," as the title suggests.206 How do we reconcile these opposing feelings about location and the inherent contradictions that they then introduce into our construction of place?
202 Radio 3, #134. 203 Radio 3, #134. The name of the song - "One Great City!" - is also a reference to a sign, giving an enthusiastic description of Winnipeg, that Samson used to pass on the highway as he drove into the city. 204 Weakerthans, "One Great." 205 Radio 3, #134. 206 Handsome Furs, "Dead + Rural." Samson suggests that sometimes you just have to say "I hate everything that's good about this place. And I think that you have the right to do so."207 This point emphasizes that our connection with region, and our construction of place, is not all founded on positive impressions. But it also suggests that part of what connects us to location are the inconsistencies and imperfections of the space. And music is a perfect vehicle for expressing our fondness for and connection with location, as it plays a role in the production of regional space, as well as place.
Space and Cognitive Mapping: Orienting Ourselves
The two sections immediately previous illustrated the importance of music in
situating ourselves spatially, the first in the context of understanding our subject-hood
in the space of global capital and the physical geography of Canada, and the second by showing how Canadian indie music can connect us to location, and produce and
re-produce regional identity and place. By helping us answer the questions "Where
am I?," and "Where do I belong," such music can help us answer the question, "Who
am I?," in a way that anchors that answer to location, and does not leave us afloat in
the space of global capital, but allows us to map that space using the social context
provided by region and place.
The emergent networked nature of society also plays a role in this, by
allowing us to engage in the creation of a more collectively discursive cultural
narrative - another form of mapping that can play a role in counteracting the
fragmentation of the subject. By anchoring ourselves in the local, this process
becomes even more empowering, allowing us to develop a reflexive personal
207 Radio 3, #134.
101 narrative in response in response to different social and cultural context at different spatial scales (the global and the local/regional). The decentralization of communication and exchange on the Internet means the uni-directional flow of information and culture that characterized late capitalism is, to an extent, supplanted by the "interactive nature of the Internet [which] allows a movement that goes the other way round. From within her local setting, the person can reach into globally distributed resources of information and sociality."208 This is empowering because by engaging in discursive cultural narration, the individual can critically and reflexively evaluate the potentials for their individual narrative. Maria Bakardjieva refers to this as 'expansive potential' - the ability of" people to envisage a novel vision of themselves."209
We should stress again that we do not want to convey a Utopian conception of the potential of the Internet as a means of realizing the freedom of individuals from capitalist society; rather, we hope to show that it provides for new dimensions of freedom and empowerment within capitalist society (recall the development of our account of the immanent subject, above). Bakardjieva engaged in a two year study of
Canadian Internet users that underscores that the Internet is used for a variety of purposes that reflect the embeddedness of this network within the capitalist space, as well as the new potential afforded by the Internet. She says " that among the multitude of use practices revealed in users' narratives, some were predictable, medium- and/or market-led, while others stood out with the creativity, expressive
208 Maria Bakardjieva, "Dimensions of Empowerment: Identity Politics on the Internet," in How Canadians Communicat II: Media, Globalization and Identity, ed. David Taras, Maria Bakardjeiva and Frits Pannekoek, (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007), 110. 209 Bakardjieva, "Dimensions," 115.
102 power, and critical reflexivity that had gone into them."210 The predictable uses of the
Internet represent a 'commodified' experience of its use; while creative, expressive uses can help individuals to engage the possibilities for 'expansive potential' that the
Internet opens up.21'
Benkler emphasizes that the potential of the Internet must not be evaluated in relation to a Utopian vision of the emancipatory potential of the Internet for society, and its impact on culture and the public sphere, but in relation to how the mass media, with its relatively few points of control, has served in this regard. One strong criticism of the Internet as a vehicle for enhancing autonomy and cultural discourse is the
Babel objection: if everyone can speak, no one is heard. In effect, information overload thwarts the potential for meaningful discourse.212 Benkler cites empirical and theoretical research that shows that this concern is unwarranted.213 At the core of the response to this criticism is the development of shaping of Internet sites and traffic around clusters of interest, and empirically documented observations about how people use networks. The first element occurs through a process of non-market based filtering and accreditation; that is, what happens on the Internet is that the process of
filtering for both relevance and accreditation has become the object of widespread practices of mutual pointing, of peer review, of pointing to original sources for claims, and its complement, the social practice that those who have some ability to evaluate claims in fact do comment on them.214
210 Bakardjieva, "Dimensions," 109. 211 Bakardjieva, "Dimensions," 121. 212 Benkler, Wealth, 10. 213 See Benkler, Wealth, Ch. 7. 214 Benkler, Wealth, 12.
103 This is a case of the cream rising to the top; the best sites, those of most interest and relevance to a given community of interest, will tend to get the more traffic and more links to them.
The second element speaks to how people actually traverse a network - by clustering in communities of interest. Sites with similar interests tend to link to each other. These sites are subject to the process of filtering and accreditation as described above. Within each cluster there are sites of higher visibility and more peripheral sites. Information and knowledge of interest to a given community can enter a cluster on periphery, but work its way to a more central region of the cluster where it becomes visible to a greater portion of the community of interest. Paths within these networks are dependent on the verifiable veracity of the sites within the community, and network users apply judgement in choosing what sites to link to and regard as reliable. In order to retain the attention of users within a community of interest, a site must maintain this reliability in the face of scrutiny from an engaged group of people.
And "[bjecause of the redundancy of clusters and links, and because many clusters are based on mutual interest, not on capital investment, it is more difficult to buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view."215
A prominent Canadian example of a site that lies near the centre of a community of interest is CBC Radio 3, which is 'supersite' when it come to independent Canadian music, and thus neatly bridges our two streams of discussion in this chapter - networked late capitalism and music and identity.216 Listeners can listen
2l5Benkler, Wealth, 13. 216 CBC Radio 3, CBC Radio 3, http://radio3.cbc.ca (accessed May 26, 2008).
104 to Radio 3's various shows, broadcast online in the format of traditional radio shows, with live hosting, interviews guests, and shows by artists. Podcasts of certain shows are available for free download. The site contains an enormous store of independent
Canadian music on its New Music Canada page, where thousands of Canadian artists
(including all those discussed above) have uploaded music, which users can stream online. By creating a Radio 3 profile, users can customize and share playlists of the music available on New Music Canada. In addition, the background of the website is chosen from photographs submitted by visitors to Radio 3's Flickr site. A relatively recent addition is CBC Radio 3 TV - episodes of roughly ten minutes, accessible through a link on the main page - that feature, among other things, interviews with artists, music videos, and loose, slowly progressing story-lines with some of the employees of the station.
The site serves as a portal for cultural expression and exchange, incorporating music, video, and the photographic image, all of which rely on the contributions of visitors to the site. The form of the site, incorporating these features, and its place on the Internet, suggest a reference to Jameson's thoughts on some postmodern texts, if we consider the Radio 3 website as a whole to be the text under consideration:
Yet something else does tend to emerge in the most energetic postmodern texts, and this is the sense that beyond all thematics or content the works seems somehow to tap the networks of the reproductive process and thereby to afford us a glimpse into a postmodern or technological sublime, whose power or authenticity is documented by the success of such works in evoking a whole new postmodern space in emergence around us.217
We can see how the CBC Radio 3 website, both through its form and content, does the same; provides a glimpse of this technological sublime. It provides a space that,
217 Jameson, "Postmodernism," 37.
105 while not entirely outside of multinational capital, is a nexus for more free forms of communication and cultural distribution and exchange than are found in many forms mass media and cultural production, allowing for a genuine cultural dialogue that the immanent subject can engage in.
An e-mail correspondence received from an anonymous CBC Radio 3 employee helps to illustrate this. CBC Radio 3 presents an "an open platform for artists, musicians, photographers, writers, graphic designers, etc.," and the site is always "looking for contributors to create and submit ideas. It is a forum for discussion and a forum for motivation."218 The growth of the site and radio station is propelled, and to a large extent directed by, its audience:
comments are of utmost importance as that is how CBC Radio 3 knows what its listeners are looking for or are frustrated with. There has been change and growth in the website, and on-air with change to Sirius Satellite and web radio. CBC Radio 3 has picked up on the new social networking sites such as facebook, flickr and myspace contacting musicians and fans through these various sites.219
CBC Radio 3 has thus justifiably come to occupy a central position in the Canadian indie music community of interest. Its attempts to reach out to its audience to build content - both audible and visible - is greatly enhanced by the openness of the
Internet. It plays a prominent role in the cultivation and exchange of independent
Canadian music, a cultural product that is central to the production and reproduction of region and place.
Benkler helps to articulate the importance of such cultural exchanges in leading to the development of a discursive narrative of culture, and the implications
Anonymous, e-mail to author, August 28, 2007. 219 Anon., e-mail, August 28, 2007.
106 for such a culture. He illustrates this in the form of a parable. Imagine three types of story telling societies, the Reds, the Blues, and the Greens, with different customs surrounding the telling of stories. Storytelling is very important in all these societies; they reflect and play a role in how people understand their world, how it might be, what is possible, what is good, and what is bad.
Both the Reds and the Blues live in societies in which everyone is busy all day, and stories are told only in the evening, when everyone gathers in a big tent and listens to a single designated storyteller who address the assembled audience. This format does not actively discourage people from telling stories at other times of the day; but everyone is busy, and there is no time for people to stop and tell stories during the day, and no one who would have the time to stop and listen even if this did happen. The Reds have a hereditary storyteller role, and this person alone determines which stories will be told every night. The Blues elect their storyteller every night by majority vote, and anyone is eligible to put their name forward for election, and to vote. Amongst the Greens, everyone tells stories everywhere, all day. If people want to stop and listen to a story that is being told, they do, sometimes in small groups, sometimes in larger ones.
The difference between, on the one hand, the Reds, and on the other, the Blues and Greens, is formal; in the Red society only one storyteller can tell a story, and people must choose to listen to that story or none at all. In the Blue and Green societies, anyone might, in principle, tell a story, and listeners, in principle, can choose whom they hear from. Between the Reds and Blues on one hand, and the
Greens on the other, the difference is economic, not formal; because of the high
220Benkler, Wealth, 162-169. economic cost of story telling (in the big tent), and the relative scarcity of storytelling time, opportunities for storytelling are few. As a matter of practicality, the Blues elect a nightly storyteller to conform to economic conditions.
A person living in the Green society has vastly wider access to the stories he or she might hear, and also much greater opportunity to tell stories. Because members of these societies rely on storytelling as a frame through which they understand their world and its possibilities, those in the Green society will have access to a much wider set of options in these regards. These options provide individuals in the Green society with more choice in developing their own narrative, and also to play a role in shaping the collective narrative of Green society by acting as a storyteller.
Networks populated by sites such as CBC Radio 3 enhance our storytelling capability as a society, allowing us both to self-author or own narrative through the distribution, selection and exchange of a cultural artifacts - in this case music - and also to take part in collective narration through this same process. In telling and
listening to stories we expand the realm of the possible, by contributing to a discursive narrative on how our society sees the world. And Radio 3 is an example of
a site that links this process at a variety of spatial scales; it allows us to situate ourselves on socio-cultural map, in the space of networked late capitalism, by providing us with a link to cultural products that link us to location and region, and help us to construct place - a further component in orienting ourselves in this global
space, through the construction of a more immediate local space in which we can
ground ourselves.
108 Cultural developments and products such as CBC Radio 3, and Broken Social
Scene, can be seen as symptomatic of the moment of networked late capitalism. They reflect its development from late capitalism, and illustrate some of the possibilities for working through the problems of the networked late capitalist moment, which still after all subjects society and individuals to many of the same forces of domination as late capitalism. Such cultural developments and products provide a glimpse of what
Jameson might characterize as the "Utopian dimension" of networked late capitalism; an aspect of it which is ultimately, perhaps inevitably, still subsumed by the broader structure of global capital. As we noted at the end of the last chapter, the possibilities that the emerging networked society provides for freedom will not bear fruit on their own; we cannot rest assured that the new socio-cultural space of networked society will develop unchallenged.
1 Jameson, "Reification," 139.
109 Conclusion: Youth, Politics, and Space
Sometimes they rock and roll Sometimes they stay at home, and it's just fine This heart's on fire This heart's on fire - Wolf Parade, "This Heart's on Fire "
Generational effects are not only temporal; that is, the concept of a generational effect, introduced in Chapter 1, as a series of events which shape the political attitudes and behaviours of a cohort, is not sufficiently broad. Generations, and generational effects, have spatial elements. Processes of generational change (as temporal events) are "one of the most important aspects of sociocultural change."222
But social change along a temporal axis is accompanied by a spatial change, as generations "bind people together with the episodes of history that affect a locality, and not merely local history, but also broader spatial and historical contexts."223
Successive generations are shaped by space (across several scales - global and at various regional levels - and by social space - for the current generation, networked late capitalism) and location, and play their part in the production and re-production of (collective) regional identity, and (individual) place. The current generation of youth is shaped by the global, regional (including national), and local dimensions of
222 Paasi, "Deconstructing," 251. 22'' Paasi, "Deconstructing," 252.
110 space, and in turn plays its role in shaping space at these levels. For Canadian youth, their global spatial generational context, coming of age in with the emergence of networked late capitalism is different from previous generations, which came of age under Marcuse's advanced industrial society and Jameson's late capitalism.
This thesis has articulated the socio-cultural moment of today's youth: networked late capitalism. The current generation of Canadian youth have come of age with the networked information society, and the ubiquity of the Internet in their lives shapes their interaction with the space of global capital. In fact, the emergence of the networked characteristics of the space of global capital serves to change its dimensions; while the physical space of capital is still global, the distance separating individuals and societies shrinks. We can map the space of global capital in part by the relational features of different locals within this space. The emergent networked society increasingly gives us the tools to do this. As we noted at the end of the last chapter, the Internet is a discursive medium that allows individuals to project from the local into the global. The collective effect of this activity across the space of networked global capital is that anywhere individuals have computers and network connections, they can project their local into the global space, where it then becomes visible to individuals in other locals.
Our discussion of the prominent role that music plays in the lives of the current generation of youth, and of Canadian indie music, serves as one avenue through which we can see spatial orientation and definition going on with Canadian youth at a regional/local level. Current independent Canadian music contains instances which reflect both the global space of capital and the vast space of Canada,
111 as well as locations within Canada. Sites such as CBC Radio 3 allow for the easy, free, distribution and exchange of such music, and provide a focal point for a community of interest surrounding independent Canadian music. 4 The site's formal aspects, and its content, serve as a powerful means for the production and re production of location, and creation of place, for Canadian youth. Further, its online context frames it within the networked space of late capitalism, and allows us to use it as a representation of the interaction of the several spatial elements of identity at play for today's Canadian youth. The spatial components of generation operate across several scales, hence youth's strong identification with Canada, their city, and the world as central. In the study by Bristow introduced in Chapter 1, western Canadian youth ranked, in that order, those choices as the top three, based on a combination of first and second choice answers given to a question asking what geographic region with which they "identified or "felt connected".225
A commonly cited characteristic of this generation of Canadian youth is their individualism.226 This can be understood in part as a result of the emergence of networked society, which allows for greater choice and possibility in authoring personal narrative. This would help to account for the current conditions of youth political (dis)engagement in Canada. Youth engage in many non-traditional forms of political activity which reflects their commitment to and identification with their local, regional and national space. Their disinclination to engage more fully in
224 CBC Radio 3 is also an interesting example in light of its existence as a government funded institution, which we can see as reflecting the reality of non-market cultural production: it still occurs in some way within the wider socio-cultural reality created by state and capital. 225 Bristow, Next West, 10. 226 See, for instance, Bristow, Next West, 1, and O'Neill, Indifferent or Just Different, iii. 227 Bakardjieva, "Dimensions," 109-111.
112 traditional political acts - voting and party membership - is explained by the developing space of global capital, a space that they are increasingly playing a part in defining by virtue of the new networked architecture of the spaces for production and distribution of information, knowledge and culture. The worldview which this social milieu shapes does not attach as much importance to the definition, and content, of politics as traditionally understood. This type of politics is still in many ways dominated by the generational context (both spatial and temporal) of earlier generations, and reflects their language and priorities - in short, the world view - shaped by that context.
This does not mean that Canadian youth are totally politically disengaged. As empirical data shows, they are not. They are simply not as engaged, especially in traditional ways, and it might be that they will not reach the levels of traditional engagement of earlier generations. This does not mean that there is no hope of them becoming more active agents within traditional politics. But if they are to do so, the actors and institutions of traditional politics will have to recognize the different generational context that Canadian youth originate from - most significantly the ways that culture and communication differ under networked late capitalism.
To draw some final conclusions about the nature of youth political
(dis)engagement in Canada under networked late capitalism we must return briefly to
Marcuse and Jameson. Despite the emergence of networked late capitalism, and the possibilities for human freedom that it contains, we are still mired in the contradictions of capitalist society, and there is still the sense that "a comfortable,
113 smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails." Youth's disengagement from the traditional manifestations of politics reflects their disconnection from the political as defined by the generational moment of earlier age cohorts, with focus on "partisan political attitudes, political events, policy issues and political news."229 But with turnout by this generation of youth still not likely to reach that of earlier generations, due to generational effects that have depressed turnout to very low levels, there is the sense that youth's disengagement from politics goes beyond this, and also reflects the deeper and more serious issue: the veiled 'unfreedom' of developed capitalist society.
The decentralization of cultural production and exchange on the Internet provides real possibilities and opportunities to use the emerging social space to exercise truly creative production, and thus to reconnect with the liberated, life- affirming aspects of human nature and challenge this 'unfreedom'. In this sense, the breakthroughs that have led to the development of the Internet could be championed on a Marcusean account as exercising the emancipatory potential of technology and reason: it may provide us with the opportunity to engage the new sensibility, and even change our 'biological' configuration, stepping away from the Marcusean second nature we described in Chapter 2. It holds the possibility for immanent critique in the space of the postmodern sublime.
But of course, we must be cautious in our assessment of the real liberating effects of the Internet, and realistic in our understanding of the substantial challenges that the domination and manipulation inherent in the space of global capital poses to the development of a free institutional ecology of networked society. Aspects of the
228 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 1. 229 MacKinnon, Pitre and Matling, "Lost in Translation," 12. 230 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 227.
114 Internet and networked cultural production and exchange do provide us with a glimpse of Jameson's postmodern sublime, and despite its Utopian moments, exemplified in our discussions of CBC Radio 3 and Broken Social Scene, we are still aware that in the moment of networked late capitalism we are living in a society that is already always commodified. The further development of networked late capitalism might yet bring us to a fuller realization of a decentralized, collectively produced, folk culture, and a society with greater chances for freedom, but this is not a foregone conclusion. And Canadian youth today, whether they are consciously aware of it or not, demonstrate in their relation to the political this profound ambivalence of their social space, exhibiting an interest and engagement in politics - but not in its traditional, institutional forms - that reflects the limits of traditional politics in realizing a free and just society, but also the possibilities in the emerging decentralization and non-marketization of cultural production and exchange for broadening the horizon of the possible, and in this way realizing freedom.
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