27 September 2009: "My little brother is turning alt. Should I stage an intervention?"

This post is about the tutelary complex. In The Policing of Families, French sociologist Jacques Donzelot uses the term tutelary complex to describe the strata of social workers that have emerged in 20th century states to facilitate the socialization of working-class children along mandated lines determined politically. The system effected "a redistribution of the market in maladjustment," Donzelot notes.

Carles, in his expression of concern for teenagers in this missive, illustrates not only how the composition of the minions of the tutelary complex has shifted -- to well-meaning members from within the family and members of peer group ("the Ranoff community"), prone to a more naked use of coercison ("Should I ‘beat the shit’ out of my brother/sister 4 being an ‘inauthentic piece of shit’?") -- but also how the stakes have changed: What is feared now is that youth will empty the meaning from the poses adopted by their elders, draining the earlier generations of their sense of self while in the process of finding their own. Maladjustment is now a matter of staking a positionality in regard to the current matrix of trends imposed by the consumer-goods industry. Identity (i.e. "authenticity") becomes a zero-sum game. "Are old ppl ‘naturally alt’?" Carles worries, or do they merely become strange, estranged, losers in that struggle, doomed to alienation? Are they inauthenticated by the aggressive moves onto the territory they have staked out by up-and-coming "alts"?

A deeper problem is the ways in which the tutelary complex is no longer preoccupied with forestalling delinquincy but instead focuses its interventions on guiding the development of a marketing-oriented subjectivity, a self-as-brand. Carles, imagining himself as such a social worker, complains, "I feel like I could help him become an authentic alt, but I don’t know if there is a ‘roadmap’ towards altdom that he could follow." He reveals how the consciences of those intervening are reconciled: "I guess I should just be happy that they are searching 4 meaning, attempting 2 be alt… attempting to express themselves… I guess ‘alt blood’ sorta runs in the family." Family bonds justify an intrusive prescription of identity, ironically in the name of enabling creativity and self-expression. But self-expression is the mere alibi for conformity to a more entrenched set of mores.