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w w w . m e d i a c i o n e s .

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T eenagers as Social Agents

Jesús Martín-Barbero

(in: Peace Review Journal, Vol. 9 No. 4, Christina Lloyd


(transl.) University of San Francisco, California, 1997)

« That which is young is identified with the modern not


only in its strong connotation, that of innovation, of the
new, but also in its weaker connotation, postmodern or
late-modern, that pertaining to actuality or the actual,
the here and now, which corresponds to an accelerated
reality. The young-modern then signifies the fresh,
spontaneous, and informal. This is what converges with
the values of an age that excessively venerates the body.
[…]Today, those who hold the key to youth’s popularity
are publicists and fashion designers. They are the ones
who have perfectly captured the meaning of the
inversion that does not encourage the young to imitate
adults, but rather drives adults (and even the elderly) to
imitate the young. The market’s success does not need
only to be measured through financial gains. Its success
also lies in its capacity to decode the meaning of this
“paradigm shift,” which symbolically loads youth, thus
constructing imaginaries of happiness and plenitude.
[…] if youth takes on a symbolic dimension, it is not
because of surreptitious market strategies, but because
in its restlessness and misfortunes, as well as in its
dreams of freedom, or in its fluency in technological
languages, youth names and condenses the signs of
cultural mutation which mark our world.»
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Teenagers have finally been recognized as social agents.


They are now considered objects of investigation. Still, the
gaze of social investigators remains tainted by the stigma of
earlier perspectives. The difficulty of defining the actions of
teenagers, hazily defined nomads, has lead to their misrep-
resentation. They are seen as social threat, deviancy, and
violence. Society’s growing interest in the world of teenag-
ers carries within its gaze a two-fold myopia: firstly, that
which comes from the customary perspectives on teenagers,
diverse but convergent ideological stances that attempt to
approximate what teens actually are and represent; and
secondly, that which stems from an absence of the cultural
dimension in social research.

The former has much to do with the convergence be-


tween the age-old sentiment that regards youth as a stage, a
phase without substance or identity, and the Marxist view,
which tries to eradicate the middle class, since it only ac-
knowledges the social existence of the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. Within Marxist thought, teenagers are accord-
ingly devoid of social identity, and are thus reduced to the
transitory period between the two recognized ages, child-
hood and adulthood.

Sociology has tended to gaze upon the teenage phenome-


non from one perspective only, thus focusing on violent
teenagers, delinquents, rebels, and social deviants in gen-

Teenagers as Social Agents


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eral. This, in turn, results in the criminalization of the teen-


agers’ social status. Another field of study, anthropology,
also shares this vision of adolescence as a space in which
rites of passage from infancy to adulthood occur.

What we have, then, with a few exceptions, is an ap-


proximation of the teenage world which focuses predomi-
nantly on teen violence. This shows that most people are
not interested in the transformations and ordeals that teen-
agers face everyday. Teens are responsible for unmasking
political discord, demoralization, and the aggressiveness
that is embedded in society. Instead of focusing on the ques-
tions teenagers pose about the muddled line of social
normality, they are labeled agents of the very societal inse-
curity they merely reflect. Secondly, many members of
society dwell on the conflicts between teens and scholarly
and familial institutions, thereby compounding the insidi-
ous belief that teenagers are losing their values; that is, that
we live among teens “without values.” This demonstrates
the incapability of understanding, of realizing, that the
values, not teenagers, are changing.

Is there really something different about today’s youth?


And if so, how can we reflect upon that difference without
compromising teenagers’ classes, races, ethnicities, and reli-
gions? I think the answer may be found if, first, we accept
the possibility of trans-classist and trans-national phenom-
ena, which are always experienced in different forms which
lead to social division and cultural difference. This realiza-
tion points in the direction of having to place our research
in context. This, however, is not the goal of this work. In-
stead I merely seek to formulate a few questions whose
absence has seriously affected the investigation and debate
about the issues of today’s youth. Second, the answer as-
sumes a two-fold project dealing with the process of cultural
disorder which affects today’s teenagers and catalyzes the

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market, the only force that seems to know how to hegemon-


ize advantageously the imaginary construction of youth.

To discuss cultural disorder, I will refer to two analyses


that study the paradigm shift we are presently experiencing:
Mead’s and Meyrowitz’s. Margaret Mead, perhaps the most
important American anthropologist, posits that in our Wes-
tern tradition the future lies ahead of us, whereas in Oce-
anian tradition the future resides behind us. To construct a
culture in which the past is seen as useful and not as coun-
teractive, we must resituate the future, thereby placing it
within our current vicinity, so that it may be deemed as
something in need of our present assistance and protection
if it is to emerge into existence.

By contrasting the two cultures aforementioned, Margaret


Mead defines this new culture. She labels postfigurative that
culture in which the future of children lies within their an-
cestors’ way of life, in that its cultural essence resides in the
immutable and inextinguishable ancestors’ way of life. She
labels cofigurative that culture in which peers provide youth
with models of social behavior, which allows teenagers to
modify their relations to their parents. Finally, she labels
prefigurative the new culture, begun during the late 1960s,
which replaces parents with peers. Prefigurative culture
establishes a generational rupture that knows no historical
comparison. Mead does foresee a change in the nature of
the process. She signals the appearance of a “global com-
munity” in which persons from very diverse traditional cul-
tures migrate through time and turn into immigrants who
arrive at a new era, some as refugees and others as exiles.
All share the same legends, all lack models for the future.
This is a future only hinted at by science-fiction stories in
which teenagers find their experiences mirrored by inhabi-
tants of a world whose complex heterogeneity cannot even
be revealed by the facile nature of the printed word. Teen-

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agers do not depend on adults for education. Rather, as in-


habitants of the new techno-cultural world, they take it
upon themselves to explore the visual, aural, tactile, and
velocity.

According to Margaret Mead, teenagers today are not


merely the hope of the future. They represent the point of
emergence of another culture, one that breaks as much with
the culture based on the wisdom and memory of older gen-
erations as with that whose referents, although slightly
altered, linked the patterns of behavior of youths to those of
their parents, which, with some variations, gathered and
adapted the behavior of their grandparents. Mead character-
izes this cultural crossing as a rupture which points to the
obstacles in understanding teens, as well as to the urgency
of the situation. In reminding us that human beings have
always been afraid of change, she underscores the anthropo-
logical as well as sociological significance of current trans-
formations.

Mead advances that it is the experience of temporal con-


temporaneity which likens today’s youth to the first inha-
bitants of a new country. To understand the ethno-social
modalities of this experience is to understand the signifi-
cance of teenagers in our research.

On the basis of historical and anthropological investiga-


tions of childhood, Meyrowitz develops a different line of
analysis. Meyrowitz notes that from the 17th century until
the mid-20th century, adults had created their own intellec-
tual and communicative spaces which they did not share
with children. All the images children had of adults were
filtered by society’s images. This is notably testified to by
the constructions presented in children’s books.

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From the latter half of our century onwards, this separa-


tion of worlds dissolved, in large part due to television,
which transformed the way in which information circulated
into the home. Parental authority therefore became null.
While schools and children’s books continue to tell a most
beautiful history of the founding fathers and the country’s
honest and humble heroes, television continually exposes
the hypocrisy and the lies, the corruption and violence em-
bedded in current adult life. While children continue to
appreciate books written for children, they prefer (a number
of studies report 70% or more) television programs designed
for adults.

What is revolutionary about television, in Meyrowitz’s


view, is that it allows children to be continuous witnesses to
the world of adults. Since television does not demand a
complex access code, as a book does, it dismantles the ar-
duously elaborated separation of child and adult spheres.
While books conceal their forms of control behind the com-
plexity of themes and vocabulary, television’s control re-
quires that its censure be made explicit. Due to our inability
to resolve the conflicts brought on by television, the rela-
tions it instigates between the worlds of adults and youths
radically reconfigures the relations between adolescents and
adults.

Obviously, television does not single-handedly change


society; rather, it catalyzes and radicalizes movements that
were previously present within society, such as the new
lifestyle and work conditions that have destroyed the patri-
archal structure of the family. For example, the growing
number of women in the workplace, the drastic reduction in
the number of offspring, the separation between sex and
reproduction, the changes in couples’ relationships, the
change in paternal and macho roles, and women’s self-
perception have all had an enormous amount of “air-time.”

Teenagers as Social Agents


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Cultural disorder emerges in part from the social weakening


of familial controls. Television disrupts the hierarchical lear-
ning process. And, in dislocating learning sequences, televi-
sion displaces the frontiers between reason and imagination,
wisdom and information, work and play.

What is new in today’s youth, and what makes itself pre-


sent in adolescent sensitivity is a dark and disconcerting
perception of the profound reorganization of socialization
models. Today, parents are not considered role models,
school is not the only legitimate place of learning, books are
not seen as emblematic of culture. Mead’s lucid perception
penetrates to the heart of our worries and despair. It is the
apathy and the disgust of today’s youth, not intellectual
words or artistic endeavors, that most poignantly express
the tribulations of our paradigm shift.

The processes and sensitivities that articulate the genera-


tional rupture as evidenced in this paradigm shift, have be-
gun to be socially visible. The inversion of meaning permits
the market, the catalyst, to take advantage of and to capital-
ize on the social construction of that which is young. Which
are the referents of this inversion of meaning? There are
two: the positive value that youth has acquired, and the
social identity that teenagers possess. For many centuries
the words “adolescent” or “teenager” suggested immaturity,
instability, irresponsibility, passivity. These words were
negative and that negation is what socially constituted teen-
agerhood. Being a teenager meant lacking in responsibility
and productivity. Today, teenagerhood signifies quite the
opposite. Now it serves as a matrix for the new social actor
who possesses value and challenges experience and memory
as representations of the older generations. After the pendu-
lum completes its temporal swing, the value of teenager-
hood does not necessarily have to be antonymic to the con-
ditions of being old. Communities cannot construct the fu-

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ture without memory, but in times in which changes occur


at an alarming pace, it is not strange that teenagers are the
ones who notice and express them the most.

The proof that the changes experienced by teenagers are


not merely an operation of the market, but rather that it is
the market that knows how to assimilate its secret connec-
tion with this paradigm shift, lies in the second point of
reference for the inversion of its meaning: namely, in the
transformation of youth into a element that is constitutive
of identity. The best argument for this change comes not so
much from the proclamation of the youth during the sixties,
which had its beginning with the graffiti of 1968, but from
the confessions and testimony of sixties intellectuals for
whom youth had not been a determining factor in the defi-
nition of their identity. Here, one would note with Sarlo,
that the generations of critical theorists, like Benjamin,
Adorno, Sartre, etc., were not young, teenagers, in the sense
we understand it today.

The other face of this social and cultural movement,


which the capitalist market manipulates, is the transforma-
tion of youth into the paradigm of the modern. This mo-
vement may be traced back to earlier times: the Romantics
were the first to make youth the key element of aesthetic
modernity, and the Surrealists constructed a hero whose
modernity revealed itself through trans-sexuality and per-
verse innocence. But, now more than ever, youth has been
identified with the permanent newness that characterizes
modernity.

It is precisely this identification which the market con-


trols, subsequently creating a two-fold project. First, teen-
agers are made into consumers, and so the market incorpo-
rates them as indispensable actors in the consumption of
clothes, music, drinks, and technological paraphernalia. Se-

Teenagers as Social Agents


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cond, consumption is fostered through a gargantuan and


sophisticated publicity strategy which transforms the new
sensibilities into raw material for its narrative and audio
visual experimentations. In taking charge of the sensibilities
and narratives that emerge from the massive overload of
electronics and technology, publicity engulfs and exploits
the key dimensions and dispositions of this culture, such as
the fragmentation of discourse, the acceleration of images,
and the destruction of narrative.

That which is young is identified with the modern not


only in its strong connotation, that of innovation, of the
new, but also in its weaker connotation, postmodern or late-
modern, that pertaining to actuality or the actual, the here
and now, which corresponds to an accelerated reality. The
young-modern then signifies the fresh, spontaneous, and
informal. This is what converges with the values of an age
that excessively venerates the body. Youth becomes a dou-
ble signifier, representing a healthy and beautiful body, whi-
ch is to say, agile and attractive, and a spontaneous and
informal fashion. Youth now refers to the body without
wrinkles and the fads that come along with it, such as the
world of dietetic drugs and aerobics, vegetarian food, and
the orientalisms of the new age. That which is young then
liberates itself of age, converting itself into a specter that
urges older people to dream about a miraculous hormone
that would possibly renew tissues, lubricate arteries, and
recharge erotic attraction.

Today, those who hold the key to youth’s popularity are


publicists and fashion designers. They are the ones who
have perfectly captured the meaning of the inversion that
does not encourage the young to imitate adults, but rather
drives adults (and even the elderly) to imitate the young.
Adults obsessively dream of becoming and looking like te-
enagers. The market’s success does not need only to be

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measured through financial gains. Its success also lies in its


capacity to decode the meaning of this “paradigm shift,”
which symbolically loads youth, thus constructing imagi-
naries of happiness and plenitude.

In a society that suffers from perhaps the largest symbolic


deficit in history, in a society supersaturated by signs, that
which is young traverses our fantasies and nightmares, thus
acquiring symbolic meaning. And, if youth takes on a sym-
bolic dimension, it is not because of surreptitious market
strategies, but because in its restlessness and misfortunes, as
well as in its dreams of freedom, or in its fluency in techno-
logical languages, youth names and condenses the signs of
cultural mutation which mark our world.

If the generational rupture with which teenagers today


confront us is left unthought (and in some measure, is con-
sidered unthinkable) in academic considerations concerning
society, it is not because investigators do not perceive the
connections that link the rupture to the restlessness and
uncertainty of the paradigm shift. Rather, the rupture dislo-
cates and displaces the hierarchy and fragmentations on
which much of the academia’s erudition is based. This
seems to scare us more than the changes themselves.

Recommended Readings

Augé, Mark. 1995. Hacia una Antropología de los Mundos Contem-


poráneos. Barcelona: Gedisa.
Bell, D. 1977. Las Contradicciones Culturales del Capitalismo. Ma-
drid: Alianza.
Garcia, L. Brito. 1991. El Imperio Contracultural: del Rock a la
Postmodernidad. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad.

Teenagers as Social Agents


11

Giraldo, F. & H. F. López. 1991. “La Metamorfosis de la Mod-


ernidad.” Colombia: El Despertar de la Modernidad. Bogota:
Foro.
Lechner, N. 1987. “La Democracia en el Contexto de una Cul-
tura Postmoderna.” Cultura Política y Democratización.
Buenos Aires: Flacos.
Maffesoli, M. 1990. El Tiempo de las Tribus. Barcelona: Icaria.
Mead, M. 1955. Childhood in Contemporary Cultures. Chicago:
University Press.
Mead, M. 1971. Cultura y Compromiso. Buenos Aires: Granica.
Meyrowitz, J. 1992. No Sense of Place. New Hampshire: Univer-
sity Press.
Meyrowitz, J. 1995. “La Televisión et L’integration des Enfants:
Ia Fin du Secrets des Adultes.” Reseaux 74.
Sarlo, B. 1994. Escenas de la Vida Postmoderna. Buenos Aires:
Ariel.
Vattimo, G. 1986. El Fin de la Modernidad. Barcelona: Gedisa.
Virilio, P. 1988. Estética de la Desaparición. Barcelona: Anagrama.

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