Early Thoughts on Youth in a Suspect Society:

Henry Giroux does a grand service by not limiting the call for transforming the economic system, but shows that it is essential that there be educational, cultural, and political transformation as well. In Youth in a Suspect Society Giroux is not content to name the blame, but points to possibilities that are ours to fashion and make real.

It is important to note that as Giroux interrogates the present age he does not limit his analysis to the economic, the cultural, the political, or the educational factors that impact a society. He appreciates, as he has done traditionally, the bonding among those social entities. He is certainly aware of the ideology that infiltrates such aspects of society like a lead that seeps into the land after being contaminated by industrial waste.

Giroux references a deadly array of statistics that has the reader wanting to believe the numbers cannot be accurate. Of course, they are. We know from the tormenting reality of teen suicide in some aboriginal communities that a loss of hope carries with it a formidable price tag.

Given the reemergence of a gilded age mentality it is easier to understand how, in certain quarters, the term socialism is used as a bogeyman. The last thing needed, given that mindset, would be a welfare state where the disadvantaged would be helped and wealth would be shared. That is the real bogeyman-sharing the wealth. Nowhere is that fact more evident than in the present discourse around health care reform.

In one frightening claim, Giroux states that according to neoliberal economic policies the welfare of human beings should be handed over to market forces. The specter of people who live in the underground flood tunnels under the glitz of Las Vegas comes to mind. As Giroux notes we are talking about the policies of disposability. In an extreme twist of logic, one wonders how far we are removed from the practice of harvesting vital organs from disadvantaged and discarded youth to help supply the global organ-transplant business, as witnessed in too many countries. As I read Youth in a Suspect Society the power of the haunting cover photograph becomes almost unbearable.

While pointing out that the best moments of democracy past put an emphasis on the well-being of youth, Giroux indicates that we need to recapture such moments not only as an act of goodwill but out of democratic necessity. He speaks forcefully, in a referenced format, about the cumulative results of narrative, images, and representations that channel us to view young people as suspects: the sixties mantra of trust no one over thirty has been tragically reversed. The outcomes of this shift, as well as the burdens of poverty and racism, make it difficult to enact foundational change. Fatalism is built into the social collage. As Giroux has done through out his writings, he claims here that the concerns and issues are not just economic, but political and educational as well.

Giroux is not willing to buy into the deranged images of youth as given, but to see them as the pivotal point for refocusing our imagination of possibilities. One of the major services of Youth in a Suspect Society is that it brings us beyond the CNN headlines of horrific acts perpetrated by and upon marginalized youth and transforms those headlines into banners for social responsibility and institutional reform. Giroux helps us see such brutal acts as a much larger issue. His purpose goes beyond a consideration of youth to call for educational and political agendas, which, in turn, build a democracy on the very needs and possibilities of youth. What is at stake here is more than the important consideration of youth it is the consideration of a just society and democracy itself.

While it is outside the province of the present text, one is tempted, forced almost, to look at the antics of adults using some of the categories Giroux presents in Youth in a Suspect Society. It is tempting to examine the onslaught of social incivilities [as exhibited in recent town hall meetings], the blatant racism [as exhibited by the anti-Obama placards], and the gun-toting soccer moms [as exhibited by the gun-toting soccer mom] in the light of the biopolitics of neoliberalism as suggested by Giroux. Another disconcerting trend is reflected in an inability to dialogue, brought on, in part, by rampant political partisanship, and the proliferation of hate text as publically shared by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Never has it been more clearly demonstrated than in Youth in a Suspect Society how a pernicious ideology can infect, stain, distain, and corrupt a society.

How have we lost the notion of making the world a better place for our children? Giroux reminds us that historically there were many instances of child neglect and abuse. We need only look to the use of children in industry and, more recently, child soldiers. Giroux talks about a disinvestment of the future, and with it a dramatic shift in how we view and treat youth. Giroux is also quick to qualify that not all youth suffer such ill fate. As we shift from a social state to a punishing state, the cost is enormous.

The hegemony of grand capitalism, what Giroux calls the invisible hand of the market, leaves its imprint on the t-shirts and the souls of us all, especially the young. The defining of youth (T.S. Eliot talked about “the naming of cats”) is a crucial matter for those of us involved in critical pedagogy and teacher education: we cannot teach them until we define them. Therefore, those who get to define have tremendous power.

In this richly footnoted book Giroux reminds us that the mindset of neoliberalism is so entrenched that in spite of the housing and market collapse, with its ensuing personal misery, that logic seems to remain. Just as the tobacco industry continues to target young people by developing chocolate cigarettes, the wider market has succeeded in linking youth self-concept with material goods: you are what you wear. Of course, this linkage is not limited to youth, as is evidenced by the perennial and inane red-carpet question, “Who are you wearing?” Giroux’s image of an endless reserve of choices can be seen as addictive as the VLTs that help squander people’s money and dreams.

Giroux’s notion of a culture of commodification is crucial for his thesis that our youth live in a suspect society. Part of his claim is that, as far as the market forces are concerned, youth are seen as the salvation of the future of capitalism. Many of Giroux’s earlier works prefigured, and laid the foundation for, this explanation of the place of youth in a neoliberal cage. We now seem to be in that end-time. Giroux gives us a very helpful distinction between public time and corporate time. When our lives are governed by market considerations then the time given to leisure, creativity, and reflection can be diminished. This logic hits us all. Given the personal communication technology we have at out fingertips, we are never not working. We have bought into this mentality. As Giroux notes, governmentality is less about institutions as it is about the regulation of consent, persuasion, and the harnessing of human energy through the use of technologies. In the midst of this reality check, Giroux brings us back to the salient question of what kind of society and world do we want. It is crucial that we do not fatalistically accept the new given reality but search for combative modes to resist and build a new order.

Giroux maps out the acts and decisions that moved us from a liberal democratic state to what he calls the carceral state. He further notes how daily discourse has been managed to accommodate the neoliberal worldview, especially in relation to youth, who are often marginalized by race and class. Another salient point made in Youth in a Suspect Society is that there is a lack of a critical discourse that gives a historical or political context. What is needed, according to Giroux, is a language of the social. As long as the concerns are seen as individual and private the answers are easy: refine the processes of incarceration. The most pernicious aspect of all this is the negation of hope. How can we, as adults who strive to be responsible, work for educational, creative, and cultural systems that inject and nurture hope?

Central in Giroux’s plea for a more enlightened youth is the realization of the precarious positions in which many educational institutions find themselves. Some universities can be seen as poster boards for big business. There is not even the pretence of hiding the industry name or logo. The damage does not stop at the branding of university buildings, but is carried over into the use of space inside that building: a what ever the classroom can hold mentality. Critical reflection cannot easily take place in classrooms that are geared, by sheer numbers of students, for the maximum and the most economical use of space. Is there a space for imagination, vision, and hope? How do we help create such spaces? That is the Giroux challenge.

Giroux believes that the first step in the necessary war with neoliberalism is to give priority to the value and education of youth. He is quick to stress that cannot be the only front on which such a war is waged. As critical educators we strive to understand the context of any given issue or concern. Giroux sees the need to place local contexts within global contexts.

In following Giroux’s analysis we can better see the over-arching power of ideology, in this case neoliberalism. While realizing that our North American society is a fractured and complex one, we can acknowledge how one mindset can come to rule the proverbial roost. When we adhere, only, to the forces of the market place we can create holes of vulnerability. The real change is that we come to see these holes as a given: that’s the way it is. That is, we learn to live the bare life and bury our imaginations. However, as we learn to understand our conditions the better chance we have of facing the enslavers of such conditions. The macro power of neoliberalism needs to be named and judged by the particulars of local contexts and turned, where possible, back on itself. Just as we allowed ourselves to be beckoned into the gilded cage, we need to muster the forces of understanding, knowledge, and active reflection to recapture the best moments of youth to reconstruct a social state. For Giroux a major hurdle in dismantling neoliberalism is the need to realize that the market is often seen to be synonymous with democracy. In Youth in a Suspect Society Giroux has given us significant conceptual tools to begin this dismantling. If we begin with his notion that society is no longer protected by the state, we realize how daunting the task is. The battle for a social state is crucial and it is inexorably linked to the struggle for democracy. Giroux believes that this struggle involves constructing a public pedagogy fronted by artists, intellectuals, and academics and others who confront the corporate state and the neoliberal ideology that underpins it. As Bono says who wants, “Their warm hearts broken by cold ideas”?

Clar Doyle

Professor Emeritus, Memorial University