Drawing lines...

I think I have an edit to the post I made about childhood earlier (Metaphor and Secret Complicities, 5/8/07). There is a distinction between the meaning of childhood and the powers brought to bear on it. Childhood means any number of things about becoming a person, but the discourse about desire I write about has more to do with a line-drawing project that identifies ideal situations for childhood. This is why discourses about kids growing up too fast is so incoherent: kids will never be any more grown up, they just develop in relationship to a new social reality. The contest over media content for children is as much a contest about time and conservation as it is about any particular social values. Childhood, and the meaning read or forced into it, are a function of a broader social system, indicative of time and social value, and the line between childhood and adulthood is a point of articulation for power.

I’ve always had vague problems with a theory of ideology that discusses ‘frames’ and their implications, and I think I’d like to hash them out soon.. now.. The first problem I have is with the stability of the terms: frames are very stable, unyielding, only broken or ignored, rather than something contestable or redeploy-able. Also, as a spatial metaphor, it leaves something to be desired: what lies on the outside of the frame? It seems to presume a wall, or reality that lies outside the frame; perhaps analogous to a lens or filter metaphor, a question of distortion (or at least a distorted space divided out from non-distortion). Frames as an inside/out explaination of reality forgets that frames lie (no pun) within frames, within frames, but all of the same size, the same function of discourse.

Duncan