Stop Time

[cbertsch]

The concept of "youth culture," even when it referred to the culture of actually existing youths, has always been the result of adults looking back on their own pasts. It is, in other words, a back formation transposed forward, predicated on the assumption that to have been a youth once is all that it is required to understand a youth in the present. That mode of identification through recollection is the sine qua non of pedagogical theory as well. The threat posed by technological innovation is that it guarantees that successive generations grow up with a set of experiences and aptitudes different from their forebears. Shoring up the breach demands the presumption of further equivalences, such as that learning to write on a typewriter is more or less the same as learning to write on a computer or that learning to use a rotary phone is more or less the same as learning to use a mobile phone. But that "more or less" opens up a margin for error that must be wished away with the help of that first equation, itself imprecise: one generation's youth is more or less the same as another. The result is a loop bound to introduce distortion with each repetition. The concept of "youth culture," in other words, is motivated by the desire to stop the very process of development it supposedly seeks to trace.

Comments

[grandissimus.livejournal.com]

The concept of "youth culture," even when it referred to the culture of actually existing youths, has always been the result of adults looking back on their own pasts. It is, in other words, a back formation transposed forward, predicated on the assumption that to have been a youth once is all that it is required to understand a youth in the present.

Your identification of "youth culture" as a falsely ahistorical category I found intriguing. I wonder if there isn't an element of the death-drive behind it, attenuated though it may be, "youth" representing a period of relative homeostasis between body and consciousness, a time when joints weren't yet balky, when the face wasn't yet creased or jowly, when there wasn't yet much noise in the neurologic circuit. To return to youth is to return to this time of fluid corporeal integrity, to a sort of uterine body; it may be that much of what we take to be mind-body duality proceeds from such things as nagging backaches or arthritis.

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

I really like the way you formulate your point, especially that last bit after the semi-colon. And I totally agree with you. I was reading Beyond the Pleasure Pleasure Principle again recently, so I may have been thinking about the desire for return along those lines without realizing it. More recently, I've been reading some classic texts in Birmingham-related Culture Studies, which is why I zeroed in on the term "youth culture."

[grandissimus.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd be interested in finding out whether Descartes ever suffered from hemorrhoids : )

C. just checked out a book entitled, Teenage, by that guy who wrote England's Dreaming. It's a popular-press title, but I wonder if it intersects with any of your meditations on the subject. I did notice the phrase "Youth Culture" in the book's subtitle.

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reminding me of that book! I've spent a lot of time in and on England's Dreaming.

I think all philosophers of consequence have had a painful condition of some sort.