Explosive Adolescence

Adolescence is a time of life that generates significant thought, writing, consternation, and celebration depending upon the topic being considered.  We have alternately considered it as a time of “storm and stress” and a time that fosters the creation and continuance of subculture groups meant to stretch, challenge, and redefine mainstream, majority culture.  This week, adolescence is presented to us as a time of explosive change, both in the physical appearance of the body and the power structures of society as experienced by the young people to whom this label is applied.  Without question, the anime that was featured this week – both in written critique and the original films – portrays this explosiveness in a vibrant and convincing manner.

While Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira viscerally portrays the body confusion and grotesqueness that Susan Napier argues it does (especially in the closing scenes when Tetsuo’s changing body not only becomes lost to him through the rapidity of changes, but does so is horrifying and explicit ways), it is her other assertion that adolescence is a time of exponential changes in youth power that is more compelling.  Tetsuo enters manhood as the film progresses, and while the storyline includes scenes of medical experimentation and physical manipulation, there is also a strong current of symbolic, less obvious physiological change as well.  Tetsuo is envious of the manlier Kaneda and covets his overt masculinity (often symbolized by Tetsuo’s pursuit of Kandea’s flashy red motorcycle).  As Tetsuo begins to realize his ever-increasing power – as he grows and matures, he relishes in his ability to lord it over not only his manlier friend, but also all male authority figures to the point where wanton death and destruction are perceived as his very entitlement.  In the end though, we as audience members seem to receive a warning from Akira that while adolescents begin to experience the power of the physical changes that accompany the ascension to adulthood, their experience of it can become explosively unrestrained in the confusion and heady excitement of this time of life.

In Ranma ½ and FLCL we see a more subtle form of explosive adolescence, but a more vivid representation of body confusion and the challenges posed to adolescents by unexpected and misunderstood changes to their physical form.  Ranma functions as a direct challenge to the notion of a straightforward and unquestioned progression from boy to grown man as he flits between adolescent boy and adolescent girl and the gender identities associated with each.  These explosive changes mirror the suddenness of physiological changes that teens and tweens experience (including first menstruation and erections, etc) and serve as metaphor for the struggle of gender and sexual identity formation in a lighter, more comical tone than Akira’s overt grotesqueness.  Without question, Ranma ½ features explosive changes and challenges to accepted power structures, but meets those changes where boy meets girl, instead of where boy meets man.

Where Akira and Ranma ½ (and Napier) present convincing arguments about the explosiveness of adolescence, FLCL captures the challenges of unexpected physical change, but presents a less convincing argument surrounding the cyborg-ness of contemporary human culture, as argued by Brian Ruh.  The character of Naota experiences several of the same moments of confusion or embarrassment as Ranma – including the unexpected “erections” that grow from his head and seem to not so subtly suggest virility – as he struggles to maintain a sense of wholeness in the face of the identity loss associated with adolescent maturation.  In this vein, Tsurumaki Kazuya presents a convincing argument in favor of explosive adolescence; and while Ruh presents convincing arguments surrounding youth and media culture, he seems to leave the reader doubting his assertion that “we have become cyborgs through the media…”  Adolescence is a time of many things – and while cyborgs may not be one of them – Japanese anime has clearly shown it to be one of explosive change.

Youth Culture

Lawrence Grossberg and Dick Hebdige both write about the creation of subcultures, the (primarily) young people who join the movements, and the signs and styles they use to present themselves in opposition to mainstream society.  While Hebdige delves into the subversive power of the style that subcultures create as an active form of protest against the establishment, both he and Grossberg shed considerable light onto the paradoxical nature of such movements.  This nature, which originates in stark contrast to either conscience or subconscious hegemonic power structures, often spells its own doom as it elicits tangible societal change.   As both authors clearly present, these subcultures will inevitably fade away as they achieve their desired ends, become a commodity, are naturalized into standing power structures, or turned into “meaningless exotica.”  This paradox challenges the validity of subcultural movements while simultaneously confirming their effectiveness as agents for social change.

To further consider what I perceive to be the paradoxical nature of subculture, an investigation into both the aberrant origins and ultimate absorption of these movements should prove illustrative.  To borrow Hebdige’s example of the Punk movement, these young people created a chaotic, nihilistic style, which stood in total opposition to the conservative ideology of mainstream culture.  This explosive and intentional middle finger to the hegemony of the establishment was done to illustrate the ridiculousness of accepted material objects when stripped of their contextual familiarity.  The Punk’s movement was initially quite effective at subverting the power of assumed social strata as every and any symbol was hijacked and displayed to the world as entirely constructed and meaningless without it’s accompanying ideology.

Likewise, the rock and roll movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s in the United States was born of a desire to stick it to the institutions that both defined and perpetuated the powerlessness of youth.  By creating a social medium that claimed residence strictly outside of the domesticity of home, the rigidity of school, and the sterility of the medical establishment, rock and roll provided a direct challenge to mainstream ideas of youth and the roles they played in society.  This challenge effectively deconstructed generally accepted roles within our culture, but in so doing muted the legitimacy of rock and roll as a subculture of youth – and sets the stage for the flip side of our paradoxical coin.

Both the Punk movement and the ascendency of rock and roll sowed the seeds of their own demise as the ideologies they protested began to change in response to their very presence.  As Punk’s became adopted into mainstream material society (through fashion, media, and industry) their brash and alarming style, and their attack on meaning, was minimized to the point of there really being no “other” against which Punks could rage.  Likewise for rock and roll, as the movement began to find success in challenging and eroding the hegemonic institutions that set parameters on the role of young people in society, rock music ultimately lost a “man” to damn.  In the end, it appears that while youth subculture burns with a brilliant intensity, the flames become self-consuming in the face of hegemonic break down, ideological change, societal adoption and a culture of incessant materialism and mass media connectivity.  While the youth subculture remains an effective tool for social change, it appears to remain forever paradoxical as well.

Reflections on our Class Discussion #1

This post is not in response to any particular set of readings or any given writing assignment, but is instead simply a reflection on my experiences in MLS 722 up to this point.  I often leave our meetings with much to consider and much to keep my mind occupied with for the remainder of my Thursday evenings.  I have found that this consideration most often centers on how our discussion evolved that night and why it seems we don't often arrive at any sort of fundamental "truths" or conclusions or even a simple consensus after several hours of dissecting our material.  Not that I'm asserting this as a critique of our classes, but more as an observation about our group dynamic.

This notion has often left me feeling frustrated and unsatisfied as I bike home at the end of the night, but this week it occurred to me that maybe to hope for resolution is just not realistic.  Maybe it doesn't really matter if we "get somewhere" at all and that where I want us to get isn't even where we need or want to be.  I think that thought is at the root of our shared class experience.  MLS is designed to be interdisciplinary; it's designed to draw in a cohort of students with different experiences, different interests and backgrounds.  We might be considering the same readings, films, and images, but we're reading and viewing them through entirely unique lenses.  So it makes sense that in discussing an issue we sometimes go around the group with everyone expressing an opinion that speaks to the ultimate "truth" of their point of view, but doesn't necessarily move us any closer to a more meaningful consensus on the subject matter.  While this merry-go-round of opinion and editorializing may leave us wanting something more, it may also be just the thing that MLS is out to achieve.  

We have filmmakers, parents, artists, environmentalists, cops, and retirees in our group and each of our perspectives holds unquestionable value, the trick lies in working toward some shared vision through all of these lenses.  As graduate students this can sometimes be difficult (given the investment we each have in our specific discipline) but the journey is valuable and the frustration can be illuminative.  Just some thoughts at about the halfway point and in anticipation of where our shared path will take us...

Here's an interesting pod cast entitled "The Human Mule" from the Dirtbag Diaries on a journalist's adventure in re-capturing his youth (cut and paste if you're interested in listening):

http://c3.libsyn.com/media/18739/The_Human_Mule.mp3?nvb=20101031041316&nva=20101101042316&sid=aa69100d6c01ab0b26b446b3c968af03&l_sid=18739&l_eid=&l_mid=1698514&t=0016df019aaaca89ebaf1

Adolescence and Crisis

I have found that considering the “storm and stress” of adolescence is not only eye opening, but an urgent and necessary practice as well.  Parents, educators, theorists and psychoanalysts have spent lifetimes trying to understand this period that has come to be generally accepted as difficult and tumultuous.  While all of the authors we have read this week would agree that there is some biological contribution to these feelings of storm and stress – due to the significance of the physiological changes occurring within the bodies of adolescents – we see other, perhaps more significant, drivers as well.  Jeffrey Arnett and G. Stanley Hall both draw our attention to the significant role that culture and the established process of socialization play in either contributing to, or providing protection from the biological vulnerability of young men and women passing through this time we call adolescence.

In a culture that has developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for the ephemeral and material, I find Hall’s assertion that the storm and stress of adolescence is the by-product of a cultural evolution away from a value system based on the lasting and the directly tangible extremely illuminating.  Hall calls for a re-evaluation of education.  He asserts that due to “missing links and extinct ethnic types, much, perhaps most, soul life has been hopelessly lost” as man marches ever forward toward what we name – or at least hope is – progress.  This leaves our species afloat in the sea of our impermanent fads and phases and this feeling of being detached from our own evolutionary past cries out for a new educational establishment.  When we adopt Hall’s view of adolescence as a unique and necessary part of biologic, social, cultural, and soul-full evolution, we acknowledge the need to address each need directly and naturally through the educational experience.

Furthermore, Arnett skillfully debunks the theory that the difficulty of adolescence lays within deep-seated psychosis or abnormal states of mind left over from traumatic early childhood.  This Freudian point of view does little to advance the dialogue on adolescence.  Arnett also clearly demonstrates that storm and stress is not a universally experienced phenomenon and seems to develop only when a culture grows away from traditional values, beliefs, and social moorings.  With a rigorous academic pursuit as his evidence, Arnett adds immeasurable support to the theory that stress and storm is the result of the cultural dislocation of adolescence.  As I argued earlier, a meaningful cultural identity cannot be built upon ephemeral fads, material acquisition, blind ambition toward individuality, and the other hallmarks of contemporary western culture.

Ultimately, adolescence has become difficult for western youth because, in the words of Hall, we are: conquering nature, achieving magnificent material civilizations…but we are progressively forgetting that for the complete apprenticeship to life, youth needs repose, leisure, art, legends…in a word humanism.”  Instead, we have become a culture devoid of humanism, where interaction takes place at the keyboard, meaning is sought in shopping malls, and experience consists of what we see on TV between continually louder and brighter advertisements.  We are teaching youth that how you appear is significantly more important that what you actually are – simply because we no longer know what we, as human beings, actually are.  And while our youth search honestly and desperately to forge some semblance of an identity out of the wilderness of material, consumer culture, storm and stress seems to be the unfortunate evolutionary result.  Erik Erikson writes, in his essay on identity, that “certainly mere ‘roles’ played interchangeably, mere self-conscience ‘appearances,’ or mere strenuous ‘postures’ cannot possibly be the real thing, although they may be dominant aspects of what today is called the ‘search of identity.’”  I added the emphasis on “the real thing” because in the end, that thought is what lies in the heart of this issue.  We expect our adolescents to develop a sense of permanent and meaningful self out of the fleeting, soulless, cultural detachment that is 20^th and 21^st century society.  We have cut off at the roots our own human heritage leaving the majority of our people lost at sea and our adolescents the most obvious manifestation of that storm and stress.  In the end, we have lost our ability to identify the real thing.

Challenging Innocence

The subject matter for this week is pulled together rather nicely under the title of “challenging innocence” as is it clearly the intent of McCarthy, Gaskell, and Goicolea to shatter our notions of iconic childhood innocence.  As Di Pietrantonio describes it, these artists all embrace the “overlapping of author with reader or viewer.  The acknowledgement that the production of meaning lies with both…” (Di Pietrantonio, pg. 90).  By blurring the line between the teller of the tale and the audience, the work of these three artists allows for our mind to roam and to become a creative force all its own.  This freedom to roam is the intentional consequence of their work.  In fact, it should be noted that McCarthy’s deconstruction of Disney like images such as Heidi, are intentionally vague, or intentionally explicit, in an effort to shake the mind loose of presumptions or comfortable sterility.

 

Di Pietrantonio goes on to write that we are comfortable with Disney imagery that might otherwise be awkward or threatening because of the scrubbed down nature of their story telling and characters.  However, when artists like Anna Gaskell and Paul McCarthy remove that cleanliness and place these characters in situations that allow for implied meaning or disconnected story lines – such as Gaskell’s ambiguous images of Alice – we become uncomfortable with what is left unsaid, or more specifically, what might be said only within our mind.  Likewise, as we search for meaning or causality in the photography of Anthony Goicolea, we find ourselves drawing conclusions that shatter the illusion of innocence within childhood play and pretend, and replace them with storylines and assumptions that leave us confused and perhaps threatened by these devious little boys.

Ultimately though, this could be the very response these artists are hoping to elicit from their audiences.  As we are forced further and further away from our socialized or inherited beliefs about children, the roles they play, and their very innocence, we begin to gain perspective into the human condition and the very way we have come to create, embrace, and perpetuate identity.  Di Pietrantonio is once again on the mark with his assertion that Paul McCarthy’s refiguring of the tale of Pinnochio provides a new and perhaps more illuminating perspective of our culture at the turn of the century, a time when “identity is as fractured as the truth” (pg. 97).  By creating imagery that pushes our minds beyond what is comfortable or predictable, McCarthy, Gaskell and Goicolea force us to answer difficult and threatening questions, while striving to tap some deeper truths about identity, culture and values.  In the end though, we find ourselves with more questions than answers…

Henry Darger and Joseph Cornell

In considering both Henry Darger and Joseph Cornell this week, we see two artists who strive to depict idealized childhood in their work, but instead give their audiences a window into the world of pathological child worship and the prisons they make for the girls at the heart of their imagery.  As we’ve seen in both the cases of J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll, the imaginatively gifted Cornell and Darger express their love of idealized childhood through great works of art and literature.  Work that is, at least in the eyes of these artists, meant to allow childhood to ascend to its rightful place upon the top of the developmental ladder.  However, as we view their pieces – understanding the fact that we bring the passing of time and our own lenses and prejudices with us to this viewing – disturbing obsessions, fetishes, desires and symbolisms rise to the surface.

In Cornell we find a man driven simply by the desire to document, catalogue and present to the world the childhood perfection that has been captured by visual and material culture during his lifetime.  His collected work The Crystal Cage [Portrait of Berenice] is, in the words of Jodi Hauptman, “a search for Berenice” those “documents, photographs, prints, memorabilia, etc” of young girls who are, in the eyes of Cornell,  “symbolical of perpetual youth” (Hauptman, pg. 163).  Cornell obsessed over the idea that “seeing a child is evanescent” and in the artist’s own words, “over in a flash” (Pg. 168).  Cornell’s response to this ephemera was to collect, bottle, box, film, and otherwise capture the children (both famous and ordinary) he felt represented the fictional Berenice, or child of perfect youthful imagination, brilliance, beauty and innocence, he so passionately created and housed (or imprisoned?) in the crystal pagoda.

Yet there seems to be a more troubling side to the nearly compulsive clipping, pasting, collecting and observing of Cornell.  While believing he was seeing these children of Hollywood or print media as they really were, he lacks the perspective of Hauptman who states that, by its very nature, the look or arrangement or collecting by an adult “fixes and defines” these children on the terms of the adult.  By framing and presenting the children – and his perceptions and desires about them – Cornell could manipulate their childishness to serve his own needs.  He could deny their inevitable maturation, he could deny their passions, and ultimately, he could deny both their undefined, threatening sexuality and his apparent discomfort with his own.  So in the end, as Hauptman so astutely argues, the crystal pagoda becomes not only the telescopic-microscope through with the adult can understand the being and wisdom of childhood perfection, but the lens through which his audience can better come to know Cornell himself.

Similarly, Henry Darger struggled to capture the evanescence of childhood through his representation of young girls both is his collages and in his fictional tome In the Realms of the Unreal.   While Cornell clung to idealizations of childhood with the ultimate hope of stopping the passage of time, Darger collected the images of little girls as if he was adopting them, bringing them into the world of his expansive imagination.  The world these girls inhabited was seemingly borderless and full of adventure, but it was also dark and the setting in which Darger allowed for the fulfillment of his often violent and sexually devious fantasies.  Throughout his rich and often intense fiction and in his collage paintings of the scenes that he created, we see the confusion and anger within Darger – the result of a traumatizing childhood, although Deleuze might not agree with such a formulaic diagnosis – expressed artistically.  Hermaphroditic little girls (reproductions of the images he saved over a lifetime) are cut and pasted into scenes of either intensely beautiful landscapes or intensely graphic violence, often featuring disembowelment.  In the end, Darger’s fantasies about a life for the little sister he never had, and his anger at a God who seems to have forgotten his pain, lead Darger to seek the same possession of childhood we see in Cornell, but where Cornell self-identified as innocent and as asexual as any child and sought to remove the child from life and the passing of time, Darger adopted his imagery as his own and painted or wrote these fictional little girls into lives of adventure, violence and often death.  Once again, the images of childhood presented by Darger tell us little about the actuality of the girls we see, but volumes about the man behind the lens.

Alice, Carroll, and Deleuze

In considering this week’s readings, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in particular, we are able to consider the character of Alice from a new perspective.  Much like the character of Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s classic by the same name, there is much more to Alice than what meets the eye.  She is a seemingly ordinary girl for her time, but more importantly she is a young girl that embodies a number of our cultural archetypes surrounding children.  Alice’s natural curiosity, her commonness, her innate ability to commune and converse with animals and even her precociousness reflect the idealized and romanticized childishness that Carroll not only captured with his pen, but captured in his provocative photography of young boys and girls as well.  Alice undoubtedly represents a romanticized vision of childhood on the exterior, but as we delve not only into the rabbit hole but into the psyche of Alice as well, darker possibilities begin to wash up on the shore.

Gilles Deleuze looks at Alice’s Adventures through a different lens in his critique “Thirteen Series of the Schizophrenic.”  As the title suggests, Deleuze recognizes this darker side as “the language of schizophrenia” (Deleuze, pg. 84).  We can see throughout Alice’s adventure the shadow of this disorder in her apparent inability to feel comfortable in her own skin and the nagging sense of loss surrounding her own identity.  Deleuze lists “body-sieve, fragmented body, and dissociated body” as “the three primary dimensions of the schizophrenic body” (Pg. 87).  We see in Alice at least two of these body types as she seems to lose track of her feet, shoulders, arms and hands at various points throughout her adventures (the fragmented body) and is unable to frame her own dimensionality at several other points along the way (the dissociated body).  Further evidence of Alice’s bifurcated concept of self is seen in her internal dialogue as she scolds herself, consoles herself and even questions herself in the company of the caterpiller: "I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since that" (Carroll, lines 49-50).

These seemingly schizophrenic moments leave us questioning just who was the dreamer, or even the schizophrenic in the tale of Alice, the title character herself, or Carroll; simply fulfilling the “becoming” of Deleuze and Guattari.  Ultimately, as we follow Alice down the rabbit’s hole, we are left with as many questions about Carroll as about Alice; questions of childhood, adulthood, the journey between and the disruption of the self-identity of the mind – the clarity that Alice finds upon her awakening eludes us.

** The image is from a Vogue magazine spread featuring Alice in Wonderland