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José Luis Brea
Man is a recent invention, Foucault would suggest. When was youth invented? Is it a still more recent non inventible invention, from the beginning of this very century, the projection of something that still continues to be, and will necessarily always continue to be pending invention? It could be: but I would prefer to venture a more specific genealogical hypothesis, at least for now: Youth is -as was man in the Renaissance and the Illustration- a romantic invention. They began to think seriously, as primordial horizons of the existence of man, death, poetry (id est: music) and desire. And that crucial crossroads is youth. Therefore, Werther is the first youth in the history of humanity. The wave of inspired suicides that followed his appearance was the first European youth movement (young is he who dies on time -in not having left off being so). Nowadays, Kurt Cobain is the last youth we have heard from. Too much yearning for life, too much passion over meaning, over truth. Too much desire that life itself have it all, be spoken all over, discover all its others -and inhabit them, disseminated throughout them. Too much tension over being and an absent disposition to be consoled with the negotiated solutions. Can I recall any others now?: Ian Curtis, before they premier the ridiculous movie they are sure to be making about his existence. They will never do him justice: a youngster is a precise and inscrutable relationship with his own interiority -something that anyone like him is capable of perceiving, but that a camera could never narrate. #
Certainly, the most recent contemporaneousness -the doorstep of the 21st century- situates youth in a place of previously unknown relevance. There is much to be said about this -it is a key indicator of the transformations of our age- but first and foremost we must distance this growing preponderance from the viewpoint the most elemental socioeconomic analysis would rush to contribute. Doubtless, the basic future of youths as figures of the era -and of youth in general then, as the major form of culture of our time- has to do with the ascension of youth as a wealthy consumer class -and that with an opulent state of societies capitalizing on leisure and therefore permitting it. While that analysis is no less certain, indeed, it is necessary to sharpen the perspective. The unquestionable centrality of the young look at the current world sinks its main root into something much deeper and more interesting: in the generalized devastation of certainties, in a tectonic upheaval of all the bases aiming at a global comprehension of the world. Without it, all youths -in other words: all those disarmed before the comprehension of our existence, all exposed to the inclemency of life, all with everything left to invent. Furthermore, they are alone in this role -the rest are out of place, uncomfortable, displaced, condemned to the senselessness of early retirement or the pathetic phenomenon of cultural lifting, of being what one is not. But let us not convert that displacement into a question -we do not mean to refer to ourselves with respect to them, but rather to elude any paternalism, any position of surreptitious disdain (including lavish praise). We wish to admit, without concessions or palliatives, the evident superiority of youth culture. But this is almost a pleonasm: actually, today, let us say so once and for all, only youth is, authentically, culture. (…) |
