The Return of the Leviathan (in the UK) Part 1
In risk society, the reflexive condition of modernity (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994) turns against itself and casts long shadows over the promise of progress by foregrounding the threats of waste and the probability of death rather than opportunity of life. Risk calculations are temporary postponements of disorder, or, in more metaphorical terms, islands of unstable certainty amidst a sea of (in)complete chaos. In this world, the incompleteness of youth as lack and waste is thus endowed with a sense of risk which marks the uncertainty over the future as the project of attuning sociogenesis and psychogenesis.
Education, training, apprenticeships, degrees, certificates and credentials have as a result become increasingly taken up in strategies of risk-limitation. Under the mushroom of the coming apocalypse, the last remnants of intrinsic value of socialization have now been swept away by an instrumentalist rationality as a result of which more and more young people are set to experience the growing gap between formal qualifications and actually required practical skills (e.g. university graduates with McJobs). Risk society thus engenders a credential-inflation society (see Collins, 1979) as a symbolic way of regulating the increasing uncertainties and disappointments. However, credentialism does not resolve any of these uncertainties and merely increases the gap between expectations and outcomes and thus contributes to the further exacerbation of disillusionment and frustration. Such frustrations could for example be traced in many activities of ‘deviance’, varying from spontaneous collective violence, such as many of the urban riots of the 1980s, organized gang-related violence, various forms of interpersonal violence and abuse, vandalism and petty theft, increases in the misuse of intoxicating substances, to increased sexual ‘promiscuity’.
The risks associated with youth are usually risks of social disintegration and breakdown. They have induced two types of responses: (1) increased discipline and (2) increased marginalization. The first response maintains the Durkheimian hypothesis that only organic solidarity can support a sustainable moral order in modern society. It is the response favoured by most Western European governments who saw investments in education and training and youth work as fundamental forces in the battle against social alienation. The second response, however, takes an almost diametrically opposite direction. It integrates a much leaner ‘core’ of collective consciousness by eliminating from it elements that threaten it. Here, the emphasis is not on disciplining subjects through their ‘individuation’ in social institutions, but by creating an ideology of binary oppositions: good-bad, moral-immoral, us-them, safe-dangerous etc. It creates a classification system in which the deviant are discursively positioned as ‘mindless thugs’, whose moral deficiencies are beyond repair and for which there is only one effective strategy: punishment and deterrence. As a way of simplifying, one could argue that whereas the first strategy was the one favoured by most Western European societies, the second one prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon dominated ones.
As the English title of that famous book by Michel Foucault (1977) suggests, discipline and punishment are coupled in the birth of the prison, but at the same time, the book itself shows an evolution in the treatment of criminals from (physical) punishment to discipline. Discipline becomes the only form of punishment. This is not to suggest that the second aforementioned strategy completely falsifies thesis of Foucault, but it certainly does not verify it. It is well worth remembering that most of Foucault’s historical material is drawn from France (although the panopticon itself was a British invention), and this certainly plays an important part in the rather one-dimensional aspects of his historicism. However, perhaps a more productive angle would be to investigate what the consequences might be of this deviation of the disciplinary society model, in particularly in the UK.
To be continued…