Fear of a Blank Planet Revisited
Glenn Rikowski, London, 12th November 2007
Introduction: Fear of a Blank Planet and the Cultures of Emptiness, Pathologisation and Fear
Fear of a Blank Planet is an album by Porcupine Tree that came out earlier this year (Porcupine Tree, 2007). I have listened to the music of Porcupine Tree on a fairly regular basis over the last ten years, and they are the band I listen to most as I drive to-and-fro between London (where I live) and the University of Northampton (where I work). With Ruth and our sons (Alexander, Gregory and Victor), I went to see Porcupine Tree at The Forum, in Kentish Town, London last Friday – the first time I have seen them live. It was a sparkling, disturbing yet ultimately warm and optimistic experience: music can induce the feelings that social critique through text can only outwardly describe. Though for me, writing at its best approaches something like the feelings that the music of Porcupine Tree generates.
I only started viewing live bands again (after a 30-year gap) last December, when I went to see Circulus and Chrome Hoof at the Purcell Room on the Embankment in London [1]. However, live performances from bands like Circulus, Chrome Hoof and Porcupine Tree show that I have had a misspent adulthood to date! I have learnt their lessons.
The lyrics in Fear of a Blank Planet indicate that some, perhaps many, youth in the UK today inhabit a kind of 'culture of emptiness', which incorporates their school as well as their home life. This emptiness goes beyond a superficial trivialisation of their lives imposed by schools, employers, parents, and media and marketising processes: as reacting to it merely induces deeper forms of nothingness permeating capital's social universe. Anger, revulsion and indeed emotional responses by the inhabitants of the Blank Planet are stifled and suppressed, in ever more intrusive and invasive ways. In this blog, I explore the lyrics of Fear of a Blank Planet, with special reference to school and university life.
The Pathologisation of Youth, and Adult Fear of the Condition of Contemporary Youth
The 'blank planet', for me, is a metaphor for social processes that have the effect of emptying the lives of young people of meaning, urgency and depth. These youth in the Planet Blank live on the surface, with real feelings, although dulled and repressed in various ways, nevertheless spilling over into consciousness: only to become an 'issue' for parents, organisations (schools, police, social services etc.), professional groups (especially in the medical world) and media pundits.
Yet, although Planet Blank is partly a reaction to these various groups and organisations clamping down on the youth, the adult world fears Planet Blank. Its development and consequences are anathema for older generations, and we prefer to pin blame on 'the youth of today' rather than analyse the social condition of youth in the context of the social universe that we inhabit with them: the social universe of capital. Such an analysis would uncover an even deeper horror; a horror compared to which a hoard of hoodies would seem like angels. We prefer to concentrate on the world of appearances for youth that inhabit Planet Blank. This social space and place is:
"…a 21st century cocktail of MTV, sex, prescription drugs, video games, the internet, terminal boredom and subsequent escape" [2].
These activities are at the terminus of the development of Planet Blank in its contemporary guise.
Adult fear of Planet Blank and its inhabitants is rife, and we prefer to pathologise those whom we help to manufacture:
"Imagine a housing estate with a park. The estate has 'No ball games' and 'No skateboarding' notices. The park is empty space. Imagine you are a 14-year-old and you live in a flat. What will you get up to today? Take in a concert, go to a football game, visit the seaside? You're talking £30 to £50. [Instead] you hang around the streets and you are bored, bored, bored…' So spoke David Cameron in his perceptive but much mocked 'hug a hoodie' speech, which looked at how youth has become pathologised" (Roberts, 2006).
The youth are pathologised; even as we fear them. Apparently, adult fear of youth is greater in the UK than in other European countries, so British adults are less likely to intervene 'to stop teenagers committing anti-social behaviour' (AOL Lifestyle). In Forest Gate in east London, where I live, the pupils of Forest Gate Community School are locked in at lunchtimes so that their 'anti-social behaviour' (Metropolitan Police) does not become an issue, and it seems that this policy has led to a '100% decrease in crime and disorder reported' (Ibid.)! There are also notices placed on lampposts in the shopping area of Forest Gate warning young people that the police have the right to break up groups of youth and to send them home. According to Furedi (1997), this is just part of a wider 'culture of fear', where:
"A celebration of safety alongside the continuous warning about risks constitutes a profoundly anti-human intellectual and ideological regime. It continually invites society and its individual members to constrain their aspirations and to limit their actions. The call for restraint can now be heard everywhere, be it in discussions on science, school results or living standards" (pp.11-12).
Yet restraining the inhabitants of the Blank Planet only exacerbates the situation:
Don't try engaging me
The vaguest of shrugs
The prescription drugs
You'll never find
A person inside [3].
There are attempts at hollowing out personhood, and ego: yet media critics of the 'youth of today' complain about and bemoan its effects. As guardians of the Blank Planet they seek to make resistance futile, and where it arises (such as the walkouts of school students over the onset of the war in Iraq) further pathologisation occurs.
Boredom, Disaffection and Truancy
I'm stoned in the mall again
Terminally bored
Shuffling around the stores
And shoplifting is getting so last year's thing
Escaping Planet Blank implies revolting against it, trying to feel real within it, or at least attempting to escape its special form of spatiality. One of these spaces is the school. The intensity of the Blank Planet is particularly strong in schools in Britain, and especially England, where processes of commodification, marketisation, vocationalisation and capitalisation have gone furthest. According to Clark (2007):
"British teenagers are the worst behaved in Europe … They are more likely to binge-drink, take drugs, have sex at a young age and start fights" (p.1).
A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) – a think-tank much beloved of New Labour – came up with these findings. The IPPR report also found that 44% of British youth it its surveys had been involved in a fight the previous year, as compared with 28% in Germany, 36% in France and 38% in Italy (Ibid.).
Drink, drugs, violence and crime are some reactions to the state of being induced by the Blank Planet. The government seems to recognise this, and has sent in its spies. The Office of Standards for Education (Ofsted) is trying to get schoolchildren to self-report on their drinking habits, but also to split on their own parents, as:
"Pupils as young as 10 are being asked personal questions, including how often they get drunk and whether their parents have paid jobs, in an Ofsted survey. The education watchdog has told teachers they do not need parental permission before children complete the online questionnaires because it is anonymous. But pupils are being asked for their home postcode" (Marley, 2007).
What do 'research ethics', 'parental responsibility' and trusting relationships between parents and their offspring count for here? There were 120,000 children in England taking part in the survey, but some schools refused to have their kids complete the questionnaire (Ibid.).
If they do get angry, and express real emotion, our school kids may be subjected to 'behaviour management' and 'anger control' lessons – with £80,000 being spent on this at one comprehensive school alone, making rich pickings for a growing army of counsellors and those running courses in behaviour control (Levy, 2005). Revolt against the Blank Planet and against its effects and consequences, on an individual basis, is hazardous. Kids risk being labelled when they 'just can't take it anymore': as ADHD or whatever, and:
"How ironic that most of the people who are making a nice little earner from championing the latest excuse for bad behaviour, never actually teach. They arrive in schools with their clipboards, observe, offer some "bum fluff" of an idea and disappear from the premises in a cloud of Ford Fiesta exhaust fumes" (Devrell, 2006).
When he was leader of the Conservatives, Michael Howard wanted to send naughty pupils away to special schools; 24,000 a year would go to 'turnaround schools', was the plan (Halpin, 2004). Meanwhile, the police are waiting to criminalise ever younger age groups, with searches on 7-year-olds for knives in Liverpool (Lee, 2005) and legislation allowing security guards to search pupils at school gates coming in with new regulations last May (Webster and Blair, 2007).
These days, disaffection is clamped down on as never before in our schools. Perhaps truancy offers salvation; a haven from Big Brother, surveillance, the National Curriculum and school violence and repression? Truancy: a no-school space where alienation can be lessened? Truancy as a response to the violence and alienation of school life has increased under New Labour. With almost 1million 'playing truant from school every year', an increase of about 25% has been recorded in official truancy figures (Bloom, 2005). Though 'levels of authorised absence' have declined, overall levels of truancy have not, and government targets on truancy 'have been missed by a mile' (Lepkowska, 2005). Government clampdowns on truancy – involving fines, and sometimes prison sentences for parents at the extreme – and initiatives involving £885million of expenditure from 1998-2005, have proved to be a spectacular failure (Ibid.). Meanwhile, the boom in home schooling continues (Russell, 2005).
X-box Time and Parents with None
X-box is a god to me
A finger on the switch
My mother is a bitch
My father gave up ever trying to talk to me
Many parents need two incomes to get by. Anyhow, given that those in full-time employment in the UK tend to work longer hours than others in the European Union, and work longer than parents of the 1970s, time for nurturing children is at a premium. X-box can fill in some of this time for the kids. A long-hours culture at work can tire fathers and mothers. In an ICM poll in The Guardian a few years ago, 61% surveyed said that parents spent too much time at work (Travis, 2004). Not just time spent helping kids with homework is sacrificed through the long-hours culture, but relationships between parents and young people become strained – as Porcupine Tree indicate (above). Apparently, the long hours culture is causing stress amongst children and Smithers (2000) reports on possible links between the one-in-five British children who suffer from a 'stress-related health problem' and the long hours of work their parents undertake. For some, X-box becomes a substitute to real relations with their parents.
The 'speed of life' is actually increasing. It is not an illusion, as Neary and Rikowski (2000) demonstrated. Time is being compressed, and social relationships are being squeezed in the process, especially those between parents and their children as the long shadow of capitalist work towers above them – a form of work that schools, increasingly, are involved in preparing young people for, in order to reproduce the ethereal machine.
And the Pills Shall Shoot their Brand Name through Your Soul
My Face is mogadon
Curiosity
Has given up on me
How can I be sure I'm here?
The pills that I've been taking confuse me
I need to know that someone sees that
There's nothing left I simply am not here
The stress created by contemporary schooling in England, with its test-test-test culture and the medicalisation of kids' deviant behaviour (leading to a huge rise in prescription drugs amongst the young) is taking its toll. Porcupine Tree's lyrics capture the alarming trend to foist drugs such as Ritalin on our young people with chilling effect in Fear of a Blank Planet.
According to Geraldine Hackett (2001), primary school children 'sit more than 30 tests before they leave at 11' making England the 'most over-tested nation in the world' at primary school level. Woodward (2000) reports on headaches, sickness and worse being induced amongst school kids by our testing regime. Russell (2000) reports on suicide fears for pupils facing the testing regime in our schools, whilst Farrell (2004) indicates a significant rise in suicides allied to depression amongst young people.
Prescription drugs are a strategy used increasingly to contain depressed and stressed kids in schools today. Debates rage in the press about whether Prozac should be prescribed for primary-age children. David Concar (2002) writes that:
"Unruly children behave properly within minutes of swallowing it. Books, lawsuits and websites have been mobilised in honour and horror of its name. But Ritalin is more than just a noisily debated treatment for young hyperactive brains. Increasingly, it is being held aloft as a grim warning of where the new biomedical sciences are leading us."
Concar argues that it is our social attitudes towards certain forms of behaviour amongst school children that have changed, and it is not the case that there are more hyper-active and uncontrollable kids about today than in the past. Rather, it is that:
"Children's behaviour and what they learn have taken on unprecedented significance" (Ibid.).
So much so, that an amphetamine drug is required to control it. Sami Timmi (in Hope, 2004) – a child psychiatrist – has argued that drugging up school kids on behaviour-modifying drugs is dangerous. In many cases, kids who are just plain unhappy are viewed as being depressed and given such drugs, he argues. 50,000 kids were on powerful SSRI anti-depressants in 2003 (Ibid.). It was reported by Sharma (2001) that in Germany there was an 'alarming rise' of children taking medication, not because they were depressed or stressed, but because parents wanted to enhance their performance at school. This is happening in the school system in England too:
"With a street price as low as 50p a hit, Ritalin is being sold as tablets and snorted, swallowed or smoked. Pupils are taking it for the buzz or, in rarer cases, as a study aid" (Brettingham, 2007).
In some cases, 'pushy parents', trying to gain an edge for their kids in the test race, are putting their children on methylphenidate drugs to enhance their performance (Ibid.). All this is rather ironic given that Tony Blair called for the drug testing of school children a few years back (Wintour, 2004).
The pills are indeed confusing the kids. But so is the life they face, and the adults are also messed up by the 'psychology of capital' underpinning their orientation to life.
Empty Learning, Learning Emptiness and Personalised Learning
In school I don't concentrate
And sex is kinda fun
But just another one
Of all the empty ways
Sex may be fun, but school-age girls getting pregnant might not be so. A thousand abortions a year are carried out on girls of 14 and under in the UK (Yapp, 2005). We have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, coupled with probably the worst sex education classes for school children. A few years ago, a leaked report conveyed the ignorance amongst school pupils regarding sex (Campbell, 2005). The government response to the report was to advocate that 5-year-olds get 'lessons on emotional life'. We are messed up on sex, and our kids have to make do with their lack of knowledge.
The failure to concentrate in school has been approached by the government through its plans for 'personalised learning'. This emerged from New Labour's 'Five Year Strategy for Education' in 2004. However, in practice, the approach does not aim to incorporate the real interests of kids, to make learning truly 'personal'. Rather it is about personalised assessment, and using different teaching styles to suit the child's own learning style. This is apparent from reading the Foreword to the Five Year Strategy by the then Minister for Education, Charles Clarke. It is also apparent from William Stewart's (2007) report on the latest developments in the world of 'personalised' or 'individualised' learning. It's a con for kids, a desperate measure to get them to engage with school whilst not relenting on social control and manipulation. The result is more empty learning, with the demands of capital for better quality labour power lurking overhead.
Conclusion: the B Generation on the Blank Planet in Capital's Social Universe
After school, if they go through sixth-form or further education to get to university, young people find that they are faced with new pressures: debt and fear of debt. My generation, the B Generation (Rikowski, 2001) cast the curse of debt on those young people who dream to escape the Blank Planet through higher learning. Of course, for those in comfortable class and economic positions the Blank Planet does not exert so strong a gravitational pull. But its existence is always a threat, a possibility, in the contemporary social universe – and for adults too. We owe a debt to Porcupine Tree for shining a light on its trajectory.
Notes:
[1] On 16th December, and the show was called 'Come closer, I have something to tell you' (see Rikowski, 2006 for a review). I was in poor shape health-wise at that time; having mobility problems (using a stick to get around) and breathing issues (with my asthma going through a virulent patch). However, the experience of the tremendous and magical show that Circulus, Chrome Hoof and Wyrewood put on helped the healing process – even though I experienced some pain getting to and from the concert venue. I resolved to see more live bands after this.
[2] From the Porcupine Tree MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/porcupinetree
[3] These and subsequent lyrics come from the first and title track, Fear of a Blank Planet.
References
AOL Lifestyle (2006) Brits 'living in fear of youngsters', link unobtainable [Accessed 22nd October 2006].
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Brettingham, M. (2007) Pupils' little helper at 50p a fix, Times Educational Supplement, 8th June, p.22.
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Clark, L. (2007) UK teens worst behaved in Europe, Daily Mail, p1&p.4.
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Furedi, F. (1997) Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation, London: Cassell.
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Rikowski, G. (2006) Come Closer, I have something to tell you, 24th December:
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The Rikowski web site, The Flow of Ideas, is at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk