Hans Skott-Myhre wrote in to say: Below is a bit of rather dense prose about youth/adult relations and the self that I have playing with lately. Personally I think self esteem is a profoundly reactionary idea with little to recommend it ...

It has been my observation, as a youth-worker for over a quarter century, that traditional youth-work works very hard to construct young people as coherent, singular identities with a unitary psychological core self rooted in western psychological notions of individuation, esteem, purpose, boundary and assertion. Deviance from these normative formations is both expected as a “normal“ part of the disintegration/reintegration process predicted in the western cultural formation of adolescence and corrected as part of the transition to adult privilege as a “mature“ adult. As we have outlined previously, this construction of adolescence within western capitalist culture serves multiple purposes and holds distinct political agendas both culturally and economically. The political formation of subjectivity, developed through the disciplinary apparatus surrounding adolescence, has significant implications for the de-colonization of adult subjectivity within the space of youth-adult relations. As Judith Butler (1990) points out in relation to gender:

If the “cause“ of desire, gesture, act can be localized with the “self“ of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produced that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view. The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological “core“ precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or its true identity.(p. 174)

Similarly, if the struggles of youth as a marginalized and disenfranchised population/multitude can be localized within the psychological confines of the core self, then the political and cultural constructions of youth as subject are obscured from view. The local knowledge of youth about their own conditions is always subjugated to the hegemonic knowledge of adult society and its developmental sciences. This framework constructs youth as a,

... colonial subject. . .constructed within “an apparatus of power which contains, in both senses of the word an other knowledge: a knowledge that is arrested and fetishistic and circulates through colonial discourses that limited form of otherness, that fixed form of difference, that I have called the stereotype. (Babbha as cited in Chambers, 1990 p.27)

This stereotype of youth, as core identity, locks and circulates the vibratory oscillation in youth-adult relations as a space that can only repeat its production within the confines of striated space. All variance must be appropriated to this end and brought into circulation as a part of this repetitive circuit. Hence, constructions of youth as offering viable alternative constructions of society or subjectivity must be discounted as meaningful, on the basis of their idealism, lack of maturity or emotional instability. Transience of purpose, focus, ideal or identity is seen as confirmatory of this construction of youth as stereotyped transition to an idealized utopian maturity conceived of as stable, continuous, and responsible to a core identity and function. To rethink this formulation requires an alternative construction of subjectivity that steps away from psychological subjective essentialism and begins an exploration of self as surface, plane and line; a heterogeneous array of mobile assemblages; an interplay of space and intersection. Such a:

... perspective suggests an overlapping network of histories and traditions, a heterogeneous complexity in which positions and identities. . .cannot be taken for granted, and are not interminably fixed but tend towards flux.  (Chambers 1990, p.27)

For youth and youth subculture, I would argue these networks are played out on planes of cultural pastiche and collage. They are constructed not as essential or core identity formations but as fractured and discontinuous lines of improvisational performance as characterized in hip-hop free styling, punk/skin slam dancing, the dynamics of the mosh pit, the constant rechild and youth careled agglomerations of punk fashion and the multitudinous splintering of youth subcultural trends such as skinheads into old school, new school, sharps, street punks, crustys, mobs, etc.

This shattering and dispersion of youth subcultural identity cannot be accomplished through self-conscious processes of analysis, categorization, review and reflection. Rather it is an effect of radical performances of self. The becoming selves of youth subculture are produced as call and response. Not, however, in the sense of reaction, but in the relational dynamism of the call-response singularity. It is, in this regard, that youth subcultures produce lines that cut both across dominant cultural constructions, but also slice open fissures and produce cracks within the edifices of psychological and rational self. In this regard youth subcultural formations of self are performative in the sense Bordo (1993) describes in delineating the work of Judith Butler and Irving Goffman: “For Butler, as for Goffman, our identities . . . do not express some authentic “core“ self but are the dramatic effect (rather than the cause) of our performances.“ (p.289)

Such effects exist within grids of Foucauldian power and along lines of Deleuzian desire. They become visible in the intersect points, knots and nodes outlined by Foucault, but they exist in full force along the lines in between. These are lines of infinite edge, whose substance is scavenged in tangles of promiscuous crossings of culture, history, ideology, technology, art, politics, the sciences (human and otherwise) – to choose but a few among many. The general terrain of these crossings has been outlined as encompassing primarily three domains. As St Pierre (1997) points out:

Deleuze and Parnet say that both individuals and groups are made up of a tangle of three kinds of lines: (a) lines of rigid segmentarity (sedentary lines like family, school, profession etc.: (b) more supple lines of molecular segmentarity (migrant lines that operate at the same time as rigid lines but confound their rigidity, e.g, the hidden or mad things that happen within families or schools, or professions, etc.); and (c) lines of flight (nomadic lines of creativity, lines that are always in the middle, lines of flux-not synthesis-that disrupt dualisms with complementarity). (p. 37)

The performative subjectivities of youth/subculture are certainly made up of these tangles, while simultaneously traversing them on lines of flight, whose edges pick up bits of flotsam-jetsam/cultural debris rending such bits loose from their moorings along the lines of rigid or molecular segmentarity. Such material collides, slams, melds and dances forward along a hybridized line of becoming that holds continual multi-valent tension along its full length. This tension in the skinhead/punk community constructs massively polar oppositional continuums such as the political range encompassing nazi's, anti-racists, communists, anarchists, isolationists and communitarians all within and along the same line of subcultural subjectivity. This effect, which becomes visible at points of intersection, where certain schools, mobs or musical forms become identifiable, exists in an ongoing dynamism as a vibratory impetus towards release that drives the line continually forward. It is this pre-subjective nomadic effect that outlines the recuperative spaces within which new forms of youth-adult relations might be formed.