the financial imperatives of the entertainment industries and their impact on family bonds CAPITALISATION

TELEVISION: THE DRUG OF THE NATION? Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy - television the drug of the nation

BERNARD STIEGLER Bernard Stiegler (2010) Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Stanford: Stanford University Press

DESTRUCTION OF THE JUVENILE PSYCHIC APPARATUS Stiegler writes of the recent change in French law which dictates that children will be tried as adult for particular crimes. He highlights how this represents a shift of responisbility away from parents and society, to children themselves. He argues that this dissolution of responsibility ignores the necessity of education for children to be responsible. Writing that: ‘The are called “minors” specifically because adult society is required to take care of their successful transition to adulthood – but first of all, and most especially, to their education : education is our name for transmitting the social competency that produces responsibility; that is, that leads to “maturity.”’ (Stiegler: 2)

DESTRUCTION OF THE JUVENILE PSYCHIC APPARATUS Stieglet suggests that this dissolution of responsibility is, in fact, at the heart of consumer culture and that the change of perception of what constitutes a sufficient education in responsibility is necessary in opposition to consumer culture. For Stiegler, all the signs suggest that this legal move will increase rather than decrease criminality; the irresponsibility towards responsibility turning in on itself. He argues that: ‘The real issue is knowing what minors – children and adolescents – deserve. In June 2007, while the new law was being debated, a French advertising campaign provided a partial but perfectly clear (and exceptionally symptomatic) answer to this: children deserve “ better than that. ” “That” in the ad campaign refers to their parents and grandparents: children “deserve” Channel Y, the television channel specifically aimed at this vital segment of the television audience (i.e. those with “available brains”: minors).’ (Stiegler: 3)

PRESCRIPTION NOT EDUCATION Adverts like this divide audiences into segments and allow the channel to have a particular audience identified. These identifications ‘become prescriptive, through a generational inversion that is only the most obvious sign of the destruction of education, to which consumer society’s televisual marketing techniques must inevitably lead.” (Stiegler: 4) He also writes that: ‘responsibility is a mental characteristic and thus also a characteristic of human intelligence as both psychic and social...[and that] Responsibility is a psychic, as much as social, quality of adulthood, and since Freud is has been clear that formation of this responsibility, this becoming adult, develops from infancy through a relationship of identification with parents who educate the child’ (Stiegler: 3-4) Stiegler goes on to explain that this is what Freud calls ‘ primary identification’.

PRIMARY IDENTIFICATION Primary identification is operative through ‘the first five years of life and ‘both distinguishes and links the generations.’ (Stiegler: 4) The Channel Y telvision adverts take advantage of the ‘brain availability’ of young children and subvert this primary identification with another morality. ‘The moral of these two advertisements, printed in large letters on each poster, is that “our children deserve better than that” – “that clearly indicating the father and grandfather.’ (Stiegler: 5)

EDUCATIONAL INHERITANCES ‘Only by thinking the evolutions of the psychic apparatus organologically (i.e., as a cerebral organ interacting with other vital organs, forming a body), in relation to both evolving social structures (qua social organ-izations) and the technical and technological configurations constructing tertiary retention (qua artificial organs), can the psyche’s process of inherited internalization – which is called education – be properly assessed.’ (Stiegler: 7) However, for Stiegler this requires the primary identification with the family, so as to be able to link the child to their ancestors and inherit their intelligence and subsequently their responsibility.

WHAT THE TELEVISION IS DOING ‘Systems of sliced and segmented audience capture such as Channel Y replace the psychic apparatus that should be constructing both ego and id (as well as transindividuation circuits in which the transindividual is worked out as the objects and fruits of desire) which a psycho technical apparatus that controls attention yet no longer deals with desire but rather with drives, short circuiting past (and present) experience by foregrounding future experience (i.e. any future as experience) in advance.’ (Stiegler: 13) ‘The fundamental problem, and the crippling limit of this attention control apparatus, is that it destroys attention itself, along with the ability to concentrate on an object of attention, which is a social faculty; the construction of such objects is in fact the construction of society itself, as civil society itself, as civil space founded on [cultural] knowledge including social graces, expertise, and critical thinking (i.e. contemplation) This destruction leads directly to an increase in juvenile misconduct, but by putting children and adolescents on trail and imposing a premature, potentially penal maturity on them, we do no more than divert public attention in the first place: adult attention toward minors and of minors’ developing attention.’ (Stiegler: 13-14)

Stiegler’s question ‘What do these children deserve; what do “our” children deserve; what do children deserve, who(so)ever they are? Do they not deserve, at least, to have fathers, grandfathers, and a family (which is fundamentally always adoptive) within which they can play, and through doing so learn to respect, that is, to love, and not merely to fear?’ (Stiegler: 14)