TEAC921B: Postmodern Tropes and Lost Childhood

My officemate and I were discussing the way youth is portrayed in the media, and he showed me this YouTube video. It's an XBox commercial for a game, but the ad campaign seems to be using what Christopher Noxon would call "rejuvenile" tactics to lure its audience.

I was reminded, too, of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 - the way he used lists to tell a story. In Viva Pinata, the listing seems to be bridging childhood visual representation and adult realities. Sure, it's dark, but it could also be the sort of parody (in the rhetorical sense) that pushes back against dominant adult culture.

As Noxon posits in his book, the tendency to use childhood novelties (toys, games, etc.) as adult coping strategies may be a political choice - something that allows individuals to claim an agency of resistance to a culture that seems to take so much of our identities for its own purposes.

I wonder, too, what this rhetorical strategy does to the representation of childhood itself. How is it portrayed and (re)configured? What is this commercial saying about childhood? In some ways, I interpret this video to be staking childhood out as a place of ignorance of even oneself. It's as if childhood is portrayed as a temporary identity set, and therefore, without permanence. I hesitate to claim this, but it seems as though adulthood is portrayed as a static destination one arrives to, while childhood is temporary, something we just pass through.

If we privilege a linear construction of history, with a beginning and an ending, then I can see how this notion of youth temporality could exist. However, if we use the histiographyical swirl Emma Pérez writes about in The Decolonial Imaginary, then childhood is at once past and present, who we were and who we are. History is never quite past.

If Ernest Morrell is correct, and "most people spend as much as one-third of their lives engaged with mass media" (92), then even the media products (like this commercial) can become part of one's historical presence. Or, using Hegemonic theory, as John Storey posits, "popular culture is what men and women make from their active consumption of texts and practices in culture industries" (65). Though media falls into what Jean Boudrillard would term, "simulacra," (simulated instead of real), that doesn't mean that popular culture isn't at once our present and history, shaping and reshaping our perceived identities - past and present. As Thich Nhat Hanh notes, "our brains are always consuming" and we must be careful about what we take into ourselves. That's what makes this commercial so interesting to me - it's taking and giving imagery and perspective to the viewer's perceived realities and memories. Each time I watch it, I hear and see something new in it.

But as Storey reminds us, this is a negotiated meaning:

"The concept of hegemony allows the student of popular culture to free herself from the disabling analysis of many of the previous approaches to the subject. Popular culture is no longer a history-stopping, imposed culture of political manipulation (the Frankfurt School); nor is it the sign of social decline and decay (the 'culture and civilization' tradition); nor is it something emerging spontaneously from below (some versions of culturalism); nor is it a meaning-machine imposing subjectivities on passive subjects (some versions of structuralism). Instead of these and other approaches, hegemony theory allows us to think of popular culture as a 'negotiated mix' of what is made both from 'above' and from 'below', both 'commercial' and 'authentic'; a shifting balance of forces between resistance and incorporation"
(65).

So we're both giving to and taking from popular culture. The question remains, however, "What are we taking, and what motivates those choices?"