24 February 2010: "Are soccer shin guards the new big trendy trend in alt fashion?"

This post is about the habitus. Carles takes on the mythologization of childhood competition in this Barthes-inspired critical investigation/evisceration/archeology of an emergent fashion trend, the donning of shin guards. "Maybe it means we r at war, and we need 2 be protected, but maybe it is a tribute 2 the past," Carles notes elliptically, referring to the generational war between parents and children -- between the vulnerable and their putative biological protectors -- and to how that struggle inevitably subsides into nostalgia, into a harmless and sublimating "tribute 2 the past." Wearing shin guards, in his reading, is a effort to eulogize the contradictions forged in the capitalist training grounds of youth sport, where parents force their children to adapt to the psychic realities of consumerism and the de-skilled workplace that awaits them. "Youth sports are important in facilitating a ‘normalized’ American childhood," notes Carles, with all the dour connotations that go along with the process of "normalization." Psychological neutering; the merciless establishment of Marcuse's one-dimensional man between the chalk lines of the soccer pitch.

The empty rewards and enticements secure the consent of those who will be dominated and perpetuate that domination in the subsequent generations. "Is ‘going out 4 a pizza party’ as a kid one of the formative ‘bro chill session experiences’ in ur life?" Carles asks rhetorically. Remember, in Carles's lexicon, "bro" is a not a term of fraternal bonhomie but a pejorative appellation that designates an individual who has surrendered critical autonomy and is instead driven to behaviors and postures by prevailing circumstances. A "bro" is a cultural opportunist.

The class-inflected blandishments at these early stages help reinforce class positionality and the stakes involved with conformity and cooperation in the exisitng social order: Carles points out that children playing soccer confront their relative privilege: impersonating one of these little Lord Fautleroys, he writes sardonically, "Felt relieved that my parents weren’t poor, and could always bring a ’sweet ass snack’ for the team after the soccer game. Felt bad for poor kids whose parents didn’t ‘man up’ and drop some dollars on a premium snack." This is how the terms of class contempt are reproduced. Indoctrination and subordination on the field, reinforced by callow rewards and rechanneled hatreds afterward. In the end, the properly programmed are apt to spit out notions like this one Carles supplies by way of oblique example: "The quality of snack ur parents brought on your assigned day was generally indicative of their parenting philosophy, and how far u would get in life." Class habitus is the all in all, parenting a matter of attaching the appropriate meanings to the requisite status symbols and impressing them on forming young minds.

Hence Carles spares no modicum of irony when he lays into the betrayal of one generation by the previous one: "This trend is 4 u, mom and dad. I know u think I have grown up, and I just wear things arbitrarily in order to ‘look cool.’ Not this time. This means something to me. These shin guards r 4 u." Adults will wear the marks of their childhood shame; the totems of safety that failed to protect them from the ideological enemy within, whose terrible victories are borne out by the very allegiance to trends the shin guards now epitomize. These failed methods of parenting leave children unprepared for the world, a point Carles humorously makes by referring to an image of a child finding an off-label use, as it were, for an orange rind: "Want to jam an orange wedge in my mouth, pretend it is a mouth guard, hope it protects me as I grow up and encounter new challenges in our world." Of course, it cannot protect her; moreover it may very well contribute to tooth decay. Metaphorically, a powerful statement about the long-term effects of youth-sport inculcation.

The contempt and confusion Carles ascribes to the generation now reaching adulthood stems from their perceived failure to live up to standards that never achieved hegemony or coherency among the youthful subject populations they were imposed upon. In a poignant passage, Carles captures this confusion:

Soccer Mom. She could do anything. Raise 2-4 kids with minimal emotional or physical support from our father. Get us to school, keep our grades up, and keep us ‘enriched’ with youth sports and miscellaneous community educational activities. I will not become you, mom. Not only because I sorta h8 what u represent, but also bc I am not strong enough 2 do what u did.

Ultimately, children attempt to escape the welter of adolescence by seizing upon differentiating trends marketed to youth for youth, of course with an individuating spin ("Maybe I will make my own conceptual shin guards," Carles bemusedly opines). They attempt to brand themselves from the detritus of a youth misspent: "So many different styles. just want to find some that match my personal brand. Hope Am Appy starts to manufacture them soon." This merely replicates the authority trap, replacing the parent-child relation with the corporation-consumer relation; both resonate with the same paternalism and naturalism. No one thinks to question their place in the existing order.

Since the time of youth has been colonized by the modalities of indoctrination, the representation of youth has broken away to stand altogether apart from actual praxis. Fashion, Carles implies, has managed to become the apotheosis of represented youth, or rather, the idealization of youth is the entelechy of fashion, which prevents its money-grubbing cycles of obsolescence from seeming entirely soulless.

An impressive immanent critique by Carles, knitting together the disparate threads of consumerism, the reproduction of social relations, the desiccated bourgeois family structure, the pleasures of spectatorship and the frayed safety net in social democracies in the time of resplendant neoliberalism. But still I am haunted by Carles's question: "Will u start wearing shin guards?" In a sense, have I ever stopped wearing them?