Youth, Training and the Training State: The Real History of Youth Training in the Twentieth Century PDF
Preview Youth, Training and the Training State: The Real History of Youth Training in the Twentieth Century
YOUTH, TRAINING AND THE TRAINING STATE Youth, Training and the Training State The Real History of Youth Training in the Twentieth Century Micheal Neary Lecturer in Sociology University of Warwick © Michael Neary 1997 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 1997 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-13957-6 ISBN 978-1-349-13955-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-13955-2 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 Contents 1 Virtual Reality 1 2 The Modern Science of Training 34 3 Theory of Relativity 71 4 Excessive Reality - a Film 98 5 Science Fiction 124 6 Training Scientology 156 7 Retrospective 183 Bibliography 189 Index 195 v Acknowledgements For permission to use quotations from the following I am grateful to Blackwell Publishers for S. Cohen, FofJuJevils and Other Moral Panics (1987); to the Department for Education and Employment for my article 'Youth, Training and the Training State' in the Employment Gazette (July 1978); to Gower Press for P. Willis, Learning to Labour (1977); to Routledge for S. Hall and T. Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals (1975), and for D. Hebdige, Subculture, the Meaning of Styk (1979); and to Oxford University Press for R. Layard, How to Beat Unemployment ( 1986). vi 1 Virtual Reality THE SUBJECT The subject of this work is subjectivity. Not the relativist subjectivity that describes the postmodem condition; but subjectivity as practi cal, concrete, sensual human activity, the way in which it expresses itself, the limits to that expression and the way in which those limits are transcended and reconstituted. That is, absolute subjectivity: my social being in a real world that can be known - and understood. This is the most fundamental question for any examination of mod em society, re-solving and dis-solving all other questions, e.g., the problem of order and theories of action. It is out of this matter that modem social thought has developed and sought to define itself as social science. But the concept of subjectivity designed by modem social thought, and in particular by modem sociology, the discipline within which this work is situated, has proved inadequate to the task. The various rationalisms within which modem sociology has sought to compose and recompose the notion of the subject have been exploded by the very subjectivity it has sought to define, not through a superior hegemonic discourse, but through the subject's concrete activity in pursuit of its concrete aspirations. YOUTH TRAINING The purpose of this work is to overcome (these difficulties of) mod em sociology through concepts that modem sociology has helped to define and support. I will do this by focusing on two concepts in particular: youth, as a dramatic form of subjectivity; and training, as a significant form determined by and determining that subjectivity. I suggest that these categories are not the starting point of social life, but are the result of a specific social process that is not immediately apparent; and which only, in fact, appears in phenomenal form. Through the positing of sociological categories as phenomenal forms I am problematizing not just the methodologies and assumptions of sociology, but the vision of the real world which sociology supports and is supported by. That is not to say that the sociological version of reality is wrong; but, rather, that it records a partial abstract account of the modem social world: a virtual reality. 1 2 Youth, Training and the Training State SOCIOLOGY OF YOUTH In so far as the sociology of youth is concerned it is only able to describe the phenomenal forms in which the process of being young appears. These forms are developed into categories through various types of sociological analysis to be further (de) constructed by compet ing and complementary discourses, for example, psychology, ethno graphy, interactionism, feminism, politics, race studies and cultural analysis, when these categories, undermined by the social activity of young people, prove inadequate to the task. This sociology of youth has been well documented and criticized elsewhere (Frith, 1986; Davis, 1990). It is not my intention to repeat that criticism here. Rather, I will suggest that 'youth' is, in fact, something quite differ ent. It is inconceivable; and, as such, it cannot be defined: it can only be expressed and recognized. However, this expression is constrained by the structures and institutions of modern society which are them selves expressions of this subjectivity in the form of being denied (Bonefeld, Gunn, Psychopedis, 1992: ix-xx). I do not mean in any way to idealize youth, or present youth as any more determinate or determining than any other form of enclosed subjectivity, although it may appear more (melo)dramatic. Other categories could have been chosen and may be even more appropri ate. For example, Selma James and Maria Dalla Costa in 'Women and the Subversion of the Community', Radical America, 1972, examine the role of women as subjectivity reduced through the determinate form of 'the home' and the objectivity of 'housewife'. I leave it to others to research these categories. The point is that these are sig nificant forms derived from the same social relations and it is on this universal basis that I examine 'youth' in particular. I will concentrate on 'youth' through the examination of a structured institutional form out of which 'youth' is derived: youth training. The explanation for the existence of youth training as a deter mined social form is very different from the mainstream training analysis which deals with capitalist social relations and their derived forms in the discrete, separate, abstracted, fetishized and alienated categories within which they manifest themselves: the economic, political and ideological forms of capitalist power. In their taxonomic models, training appears as something exogenous, external and outside capitalist accumulation: not a social relation, but a func tional technique that corresponds to the logic of capital. Training is Virtual Reality 3 functionally analysed as a device for social control, or preserving the work ethic, or limiting wage demands, or facilitating the introduc tion of new technology, or enabling the unemployed to find work, or massaging the unemployment figures. Training is then criticized for the extent to which it has been unsuccessful or too successful in achieving any of these implicit or explicit functions (Finn, 1987). But before embarking on an analysis of youth training it is necessary to account for the real existence of the virtual reality through which sociology describes itself. ALIENATED LABOUR The virtual nature of bourgeois reality, and the uncritical represen tation by bourgeois thought of the apparent real world, was de constructed by Karl Marx initially through his theory of alienated labour in the &onomic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and later developed more concretely in Capital I (1867) through his theory of commodity fetishism. For Marx, appearance implied presupposition. That is, the naturalness of the social world is not the natural world, but the epitome of a form of social activity that is not immediately apparent. The problem for any deconstruction of bourgeois thought is that in capitalist society things do manifest social power. The rep resentations are real. The spaces for a critique are the determinations that representation implies: the content out of which the form is derived. Bourgeois social thought denies this content, representing these representations (ideologically) as eternal and immutable facts of life. Marx sought out the derivation of these apparent phenom enal forms through an investigation of their determinations. Writing through, among others, the work of Hegel, Smith, Proudhon and Engels, Marx began with the concept of private property. This was no arbitrary choice: private property is the crucial category of bour geois social thought and is the foundation of bourgeois reality. It philosophically defines the alienated forms of social life, assigning social powers to things and thus obscuring the real subject of society (Clarke, 1991: 63). Marx argued that it is not private property that is the foundation of alienated labour, but, on the contrary, that alienated labour is the foundation of private property. In a society based on commodity production: 4 Youth, Training and the Training State the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces ... The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things. Labour not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity ... The product of labour [becomes] the objectification of labour. His labour becomes an alien object that exists independently of the worker ... [and] ... the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over and against himself ... What the product of his labour is, he is not. (Capital 1: 324) This alienated activity, the way in which the product of labour comes to exist apart from the direct producer, is the result of the fact that the propertyless worker has become a slave to need, and therefore is forced to subordinate his or her labour to the need for a thing: money. Thus through the activity of work the worker is lost to him/ herself. Not only detached from self but also estranged from their species and species-life: the active fashioning, creation and contem plation of the world around them, and from other workers. But the worker's self-loss is someone else's gain: If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, and if it confronts him as an alien power, this is only possible because it belongs to a man other than the worker. (Capital 1: 330) The product of alienated labour thus becomes the source of enjoy ment for someone else. It is very clear that this source of pleasure, this private property, is the result of the activity of alienated labour. As Marx has it: through estranged, alienated labour the worker creates the rela tionship of another man, who is alien to labour and stands outside it, to that labour. The relation of the worker to labour creates the relation of the capitalist - or whatever word one chooses for the master of that labour-to that labour. Private property is therefore the product, result and necessary consequence of alienated la bour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. (Capital 1: 332) Thus the proprietorial relations between a person and a thing ex press a more fundamental social relation between people. The legal form of private property presupposes the social relation of alienated labour (Clarke, 1991: 67).
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