Television and Youth Culture Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation Series Editors: jan jagodzinski, University of Alberta Mark Bracher, Kent State University The purpose of this series is to develop and disseminate psychoanalytic knowl- edge that can help educators in their pursuit of three core functions of education. These functions are: 1) facilitating student learning; 2) fostering students’ personal development; and 3) promoting prosocial attitudes, habits, and behaviors in students (i.e., those opposed to violence, substance abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.). Psychoanalysis can help educators realize these aims of education by providing them with important insights into: 1) the emotional and cognitive capacities that are necessary for students to be able to learn, develop, and engage in prosocial behavior; 2) the motivations that drive such learning, development, and behaviors; and 3) the motivations that produce antisocial behaviors as well as resistance to learning and development. Such understanding can enable educators to develop pedagogical strategies and techniques to help students overcome psychological impediments to learning and development, either by identifying and removing the impediments or by helping students develop the ability to overcome them. Moreover, by offering an under- standing of the motivations that cause some of our most severe social problems— including crime, violence, substance abuse, prejudice, and inequality—together with knowledge of how such motivations can be altered, books in this series will contribute to the reduction and prevention of such problems, a task that educa- tion is increasingly being called upon to assume. Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation By Mark Bracher Teaching the Rhetoric of Resistance: The Popular Holocaust and Social Change in a Post 9/11 World By Robert Samuels Television and Youth Culture: Televised Paranoia By jan jagodzinksi Television and Youth Culture Televised Paranoia jan jagodzinski TELEVISION AND YOUTH CULTURE Copyright © jan jagodzinski, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7808-0 (paper back) ISBN-10: 1-4039-7808-5 (paper back) ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7648-2 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 1-4039-7648-1 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: December 2008 10987654321 Printed in the United States of America. in loving memory of my father Michal Jagodzin´ski (1923–2006) who was unable to see this book’s completion This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction: Youth Living in Paranoiac Times 1 The Paranoia of the Posthuman 2 Between Post-Oedipus & Anti-Oedipus 7 Part I: Theoretical Considerations 15 1. Madness and Paranoia 17 The Vicissitudes of the Schreber Case 17 Post-Oedipal Concerns 18 Post 9/11 Paranoia 20 Televised Simulacra 24 The Power of the Simulacrum 26 2. From Self-Reflexion to Self-RefleXion: Acknowledging the Inhuman 29 From Self-Reflection to Self-Reflexion 31 Self-Reflexive Irony 35 Paranoia within Risk Societies 36 Self-RefleXion: In between Nature and Culture 39 X as the Meeting Place between Lacan and Deleuze 42 Part II: Self-RefleXive Narcissism and Alienation 47 3. Dawson’s Creek’s Reflexivity: Savvy Poststructuralism 49 Prelude: Horrific Screams of Teen’s Hidden Angst 49 Scream and Scream Again: The Pleasures of Self-Referentiality 50 The Final Girl’s Scream 55 Post-Oedipal Screams 57 4. Dawson’s Creek: The Postlude 61 There Ain’t No Rap but Capeside Pap 64 Young Love, Pure “Confluent” Love? 65 Confluent Fag-Hag Love 67 Ironic Self-Reflexivity—The Final Episode’s Joke on Us 70 5. Freaks and Geeks: “I Don’t Give a Damn ’Bout a Bad Reputation” 75 Hegemonic Masculinity 80 Resistance, Rebellion, or Deviance? 81 F&G’s Music Scene 86 The Power of Refrain 88 6. And the Geeks Freaks Will Inherit the Earth 91 The Limits of Post-Subcultural Studies 91 Questioning Hegemony 92 Lacan-Deleuze on Multiplicity 95 Laughing with Daniel in the Lion’s Den 97 viii CONTENTS Sam: Be Careful What You Desire 100 Deleuzian Ethics: Good Girl Becoming-Freak 102 Lindsay’s Ethical Turn 104 A Diagram of the Good Girl’s Escape 107 Part III: Real Paranoia 111 7. The Death Drive’s at Stake: Buffy: The Vampire Slayer 113 The Usual (Objectionable) Suspects 114 The Heroine with a Call 116 Opening Up a Porthole: Scratching the Tain of the Mirror 117 Paranoid Psychosis: Suspending the Name-of-the-Father 120 Psychotic-like Language as Ethical Slayage 123 The Matrix of Players: The ONE=THREE of Buffy’s Postfeminism 126 The Boyz/Bois/Boys and Gurls/Girls/Grrrls in Buffy 128 8. The Buffyverse Soteriology: Youth’s Garden of Earthly Delights 133 The Doubled Road of Ethics 137 An Ethical Act Proper 142 Postscript 145 9/11 Addendum: Has the “Future of an Illusion” Collapsed? 145 Part IV: Televised Paranoiac Spaces 151 9. Aliens “R” Us: Searching for the Posthuman Teenager 153 Raising Sleeping Beauty from the Dead 154 Paranoiac Split 155 Facing the Alien to the Side 157 Alien Love 158 Post-Oedipal Flips 161 Alien-Angels 162 Abductions 163 Queering Kinship 164 The Roswell Beat 165 The Alliance as War Machine 166 Posthumanist Line of Flight 166 10. Smallville, Somebody Save Me! Bringing Superman Down to Earth 169 Marvel-ing Superman 169 Into the Vortex of the Tornado 175 Wholesome Goodness 176 The Alien Messiah: No Flying Allowed! 179 Fate/Destiny/Choice: Earning His Angel Wings 180 Why A Third Father? Reforming the Criminal CEO 183 Disjunctively Speaking 185 11. Stamping Out Alien-Human Freaks: Smallville’s Moral Duty 187 It’s Raining Mutants 188 CONTENTS ix $ ϽϾ S : Or Why Do Lex and Clark Not Laugh at Themselves? 191 Egghead Paranoia 193 Between Fantasy and Delusion—Is a Very Thin Line 195 Afterword—A Self-RefleXive Moment 197 Notes 201 References 221 Index 239 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments have a number of people to thank for making this book possible. I would first Ilike to thank Gayle Gorman for the special edition of the cover. Her choice of the “still” from the television series Freaks and Geeks is just perfect. I would also like to thank Brad Smilanich for the generous use of his extensive DVD library. At the beginning of this project he gave me first-season starter sets on a number of television series that I ended up viewing. It was Brad who put me on to Freaks and Geeks. And, to Mark Bracher, my friend and coeditor of the Education, Psychoanalysis, Social Transformation book series. His support and commentary are always welcome. Lastly, I would like to thank the staff of Macmillan Publishing Solutions for the amazing detail and care that they took with my text. I appreci- ated their amazing eye for detail and feel for the language. Without a thorough edit, this text would never have reached the shape that it is in. This page intentionally left blank Introduction: Youth Living in Paranoiac Times Is psychoanalysis a successful paranoia because it claims to have the last word in every discussion, the decisive explanation to every interpretation, the universal key to opening and closing every problem? Or might its success and inability to laugh at itself result instead from the need to invade all existence for all time? (François Roustang, “How Do You Make a Paranoiac Laugh?”) his is the third book in a trilogy that began with Youth Fantasies (2004), which Twas followed by Music in Youth Culture (2005). In those first two books, a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework was put to use to theorize the complexity of youth, interrogated to some extent by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (some- times cited as D+G, but I am not consistent) challenge to Jacques Lacan’s domi- nant position. I took popular media culture seriously, exploring films, the Internet, video games, and a particular selection of music (gangsta rap, Nü metal, grunge, grrrl culture, techno) to identify what I took to be post-Oedipal develop- ments in youth where postadolescence has been culturally extended to blur clear- cut distinctions of adulthood brought about by the global sociohistorical changes wrought by capitalism and its accompanying teletechnologies. Television and Youth Culture: Televised Paranoia is a slight departure in the sense that the media of concentration is television—more specifically, televised youth series whose ubiquitous and seemingly innocuous programming constantly invades our homes and daily lives. Those who are expecting the usual ethnographic study of youth, complete with transcripts and analysis, will be disappointed. The fictional narratives that emerge in these televised serials, as well as the fictional narratives that emerge in research, especially arts-based research where the imaginary is for- warded, do not escape their fantasy frames. In some forms of arts-based research, the overbloated ego of autobiography only seems to produce a fantasy frame and little else. My intent is to rethink the representation of youth on television along psychoanalytic lines. Deleuze and Guattari come more to the fore in my continued attempts to find a transpositional space between them and Lacan to help theorize the becoming of youthful identities in postmodern times.