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The Thomas Paine Reader (Penguin Classics)
Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. Amazon Renewed Refurbished products with a warranty. Amazon Second Chance Pass it on, trade it in, give it a second life. Paine lies in a bit gap below the grass and weeds of an imprecise farm in the United States. There, although, he shall now not lie, left out, for much longer. He belongs to England. His status is the valuables of the English; and if no people. That different has a correct to exclude him. That that is now known as aristocracy implies an inequality of rights; yet who're the individuals that experience a.
Has no half in it. The camerawork again condenses the narrative form -not only because it takes on the perspective of the child; the events turn the view into a forbidden and thus fugitive eye: We can assume that when she caught herself watching the scene, the daughter had no understanding of the significance of the events she was watching; this is clear from the fact that the text speaks only of belting, not of rape. The scandal of the story only makes itself felt in the postscript.
Suddenly the ignorant child recognizes the terrible significance: Fate thereby leaps onto the narrator. There is a mythical bond around the three protagonists in which the observer is involved. The camerawork draws him irresistibly into the insight, intimacy and transience of the childish view of the world.
It is extremely instructive how Moffatt alternates the perspective of the observer and the observed, how she makes us once accomplices of the perpetrator and the victim and then more removed observers. In Doll Birth, , the observer suddenly takes on the position of the punitive mother, and the clenched suffering of the prepubescent boy, a mixture of naivety and sexual curiosity, strikes him directly as his gaze meets the returning look of the child.
We remain completely distanced from the scenery of the Wizard of Oz, The young boy is supposed to play Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. His father, the accompanying text tells us, is angry because he has dressed up too early. The camera angle is chosen so that the observer feels like an excluded third party.
More by Fernando Savater
The contours of the bourgeois interior and the bearing of the straight-laced father show themselves all the more sharply. Everything has its place; the clock on the mantelpiece, the hieratically ordered Humpty-Dumpty figures, and not the least the father himself, who has retreated into the armchair, wrapped in a blanket, with his newspaper on his lap.
He gesticulates with his pipe, taking of the gesture of that disembodiment clay figure. At a stroke, the late Victorian morality of his bearing, which flies off the handle at the least irritation, is exposed to us, and we feel what this empty, pedestrian gesture must mean to the young man who is at this moment totally involved in his theatre role. The short-term disturbance of the adult bourgeois selfimage recoils on the child with redoubled force. Here we see, as if in a magnifying class, what haunts the series: Conversely, none of the key characters seems to be aware of the extent of their action.
For them it has sunk into oblivion. Thus a field of tension develops between subjective experience and the social role, which is tantamount to the precise analysis of stigmatizing events. They illuminate the psycho-social dimension much more abruptly, with brevity and selectivity. This is what distinguishes them as the products of the artistic imagination and makes them unmistakable. On the other hand, Moffatt employs a system that has been established in western pictorial art since the 16th century: In emblematics we find a three-way division into Pictura icon , Inscriptio motto and Subscriptio, which explains and interprets the picture.
Surprisingly, the same openness that we meet in Moffatt governs the relationship between the three components of allegorical art. The motto does not fully cover the meaning of the picture, And, for another thing, is essential that the emblem intends its pictorial world to bear some relation to reality; the Scarred for Life series follows suit on this as well. Finally, here too the picture has primacy over language. But whereas emblematics has built up a ramified canon of aphorisms, rules of conduct and moral teachings, Moffatt begins precisely where these types of social constants run out —more accurately, where the apparently orderly world of the child and the adolescent starts to come apart for a moment, and in he long term is trapped in this way in the consciousness.
However, with all of us being familiar with these kinds of traumas, the basic idea of. In Scarred for Life we come across an archive of possible traumas which have lodged themselves unconsciously and unpredictably under the apparently constant surface of human relationships. He has written for the magazines Nike and Artforum, and published numerous critical pieces and catalogue essays on contemporary art. La respuesta de la madre, Soy algo aparte de todo el mundo y no acepto las condiciones de nadie. Nosotros hemos rechazado esta doble herencia o, mejor dicho, la hemos remodelado de modo distinto.
Pero en ambos casos es la referencia infantil la que triunfa: De este modo las civilizaciones cansadas se fabrican oasis de juventud retrospectiva. El deterioro del rostro refleja el del alma. Y ya conocemos esas mil reformas Para resultar soportable, el tedioso estancamiento de la vida ha de ir asimismo de la mano de una indefectible puerilidad que se rebele contra el orden y la seriedad.
En cada etapa de la vida, en efecto, nos acechan dos peligros: Tal vez una vida lograda sea eso: Entonces la infancia como gracia casi divina puede marcar el rostro del anciano como la senilidad precoz imprimirse en el del joven. Como dijo la princesa Bibesco: Doctor en letras, ha sido profesor invitado en las Universidades de San Diego en California y Nueva York , y colaborador de Le Nouvel Observateur desde Some little, very little adults Pascal Bruckner I have the right to respond to all your complaints about an eternal I.
You have to submit to all my whims and consider it normal that I grant myself such distractions. If we believe Victor Hugo, in the XVII century, some secret brotherhoods called boybuyers travelled around Europe trading boys for the use of kings, popes and sultans. They bought the youngsters from their families, usually poverty stricken, and, by way of an appalling orthopaedic science, they enclosed them in urns to stunt their growth, make them puny, convert them into monsters, into eunuchs or buffoons destined to excite the hilarity of the masses.
However, we might ask ourselves whether, in their shrewd way, they practice other equally astounding metamorphosis, whether we are experiencing a mutation, which affects our very definition of what is human. In other words, whether looming over each one of us is a true invitation to immaturity, a way of infantilising adults and of confining children to infancy, of hindering their growth. The good savage at home Childhood, like the family, Philippe Aries tells us in a famous essay, is a recent sentiment in Europe.
Considered during the middle ages as something small and fragile, faceless and soulless, a res nullius —infant death rates were very high then-, children did not have access to humanity until very late. Until then, they lived mingled with their elders, in a state of total promiscuity that would shock us today, carrying out their apprenticeship of existence in their midst. It would be necessary to await the XVII century, with the schooling movement initiated by religious orders, for the appearance in the upper classes of the separation of childhood and the birth of the family as a seat of intimacy and of private affection.
Presumed innocent, after the image and likeness of the baby Jesus —who is represented until the Renaissance as a miniature man-, children are to be preserved from all deleterious influences, isolated and placed under the control of pedagogues who try to prepare them for adulthood. The educational fervour prevails with its retinue of solicitations, specialists and appropriate methods and it is to reach its height in the XIX century. We have rejected this double inheritance or, better yet, we have remoulded it in a different way.
Another tradition originating from Rousseau and Freud has modified our vision of childhood; this has not only become the key of adult development, a key lost forever —psychoanalysis shows us-, but above all a. From Rousseau comes the alliance between the child and the savage, since both live in immediate communion with things, in limpid apprehension of truthfulness, in a purity that civilisation and society still has not altered.
From Freud, we conserve especially the importance granted to the first years of life; childhood has all the loveliness of a foundation that obsesses us up until our last breath. In that strange coalition, Rousseau though a Rousseau reinterpreted and deformed for here the happy state of nature is irremediably abolished rules the roost. By anticipating our interest in primitive peoples, he announces, in his always splendorous way, two of the most intense intellectual obsessions of the modernity: After him, something is stewing in the XIX century which will place the demented, the artist, the rebel, the child and the savage on the same level, all of them unamenable to civilised order, all oriented toward an origin lost underneath the heap of conventions and coactions of the system.
Children are colonized by the family, as the primitives are the children of humanity, the demented the pariah of reason and the poet the savage of developed societies, all carriers of a flame that perturbs the established order. And since age is a fall into the lies of appearance and the industrial world a decadence far from natural equilibrium, one must pay attention to those sparkling fires and drink from those live fountains to discover the truth once again. Hence tired civilisations manufacture oasis of retrospective youth.
Despite this, or better yet, due to his weakness, he is more aware of it than we are, he is almost capable of becoming the parent of his parents. It is our past and our future at the same time, The Golden Age in short trousers. Not only does he awaken the nostalgia of an abolished Eden, he also invites us with his mere example to rediscover that vanished splendour. Since growing is declining and betraying the promises of youth, we must venerate the eternal child dormant within us who only wishes to be reborn.
The more conscious an individual becomes of his responsibilities and the burdens weighing upon him, the more he projects this lost carelessness upon the child he once was. That magical state is an absolute from which he is excluded: Oscar Wilde, at the end of last century, was to illustrate this verification fantastically in The Picture of Dorian Gray: The deterioration of the face reflects that of the soul. Yesterday, we isolated youth to preserve it from the affronts of age; now, instead, we are trying to preserve it from the anguish of maturity, considered beforehand as a punishment.
Thus, there once was an epoch in which childhood was more than imbecility and fragility, in which excesses had to be polished; today, no one would dare, especially in the schools, to say our little savages have bad manners. Even their slightest nonsense is venerated like treasures of profoundness, an abyss of spontaneous poetry; their scribbling is We have to learn from those vandals in stockings because they live enlightened by the great light of beginnings.
To be bearable, the tedious stagnancy of life must go hand in hand with an unfailing puerility that rebels against order and seriousness.
Maximal Variety
Also existing is a good use of immaturity, a way of remaining as close as possible to the seductions of childhood that nourish within us an invigorating impulse against the sclerosis of routine. In each stage of life, indeed, two dangers stalk us: How do we mature without resigning ourselves? How do we conserve mental freshness without falling again into adolescent simplicity? Now then, what we comprehend in the instants of the grace of existence, those marvellous moments in which ecstasy overcomes us, is that there are two childhoods possible in life: Childhood is a second candour that is recovered after having lost it, a beneficial rupture that offers us a rush of new blood and breaks the shell of custom.
Hence there is a way of infantilising oneself that is a testimony of renovation against the petrified and fossilised life: To go through every childhood, as San Francisco de Sales demanded, is to stay close to the fecundity of the first years, is to break the limits of the old self by submerging oneself in a purifying bath.
Perhaps, an accomplished life is just that: A life in which nothing is petrified, nothing is irreversible, and which grants, even the apparently most rigid destiny, a margin for play that is the margin of freedom. Then childhood is no longer a pathetic refuge, a disgraceful disguise turned to by the withered old adult, but rather the supplement of an already plentiful existence, the happy overflow for he who, having travelled his journey, can submerge himself again in spontaneity and the charm of earlier times.
Then childhood as an almost divine grace can mark the elderly face like premature senility can imprint itself on a young one. Pascal Bruckner Paris, , is both Philosopher and writer. Since he has also collaborated with Le Nouvel Observateur. Essai sur le devoir de bonheur Youth, beauty and pride are some of the words that this young Finnish photographer likes to use and which he associates with his images when he talks about his work.
These young people are not, however, urban guerrillas, they are the young middle class, with just that amount of rebellion which all judge to be appropriate to their age and time. There is nothing more heroic in them than the fact that they confront adolescence with the weapons which are characteristic of their age: Their images offer us fragments of urban parties, groups having a good time, young people meeting up with each other at the discotheque, getting together to drink, dance, discover sex; strengthened by the group, protected underneath their clothes, behind their coloured lenses, their make-up, and their more or less grotesque disguises.
There are also painful discoveries, fights, loneliness, dream fantasies, desires and frustrations which attempt to conceal themselves behind a fight, a few scars, a smile, a few drinks or a few joints. Perhaps the expressions of these young urban dwellers are the most sincere thing they offer us, and it is in there where one must look for their essence, their true characters. The photographer pays special attention to those expressions and the play of relationships, both mental and physical which are formed with those facial lines so full of the intention they trace between each other, lines of a bond which bounce back and finally reach the observer.
Photographs taken close up, specific characters, Lehtola centres his image on these bodies and faces which fill the whole surface of the photograph.
He makes no explicit references to the place, nor does he propose any narration. He plays with the idea of spontaneity in contrast to the attitude of professional models. These are just young people who make a brief pause in their relationships and games of looks, attacks and seduction to look at the camera, to look at all of us, and particularly so that we look at them, so that we see them. En estos dos casos, tanto las mujeres musulmanas como las de emigrantes del Este, se trata de unos colectivos doblemente marginales: Close-ups of young people, mainly women, comprise the work of this young Dutch artist.
Youth becomes a bond between the women photographed and the woman who photographs them. This brief selection mixes two series by van Balen, the first and most famous of the ones she has done up till now are portraits of young people in the Muslim community living in Amsterdam. In these portraits the expressions of the little girls and adolescents is particularly striking, especially the peculiar way in which the scarves and headgear they cover their hair with frame their faces: The second series is centred on portraits of young people and women from Eastern Europe who have moved to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
These portraits are much larger, and although we also see here a number of close-ups, the faces and their expressions talk to us of something very different. That tranquillity, that clarity and almost innocence there was in the young Muslim girls is now no longer there. Here the marks, the bags under the eyes, the blotches on the skin, any detail at all is blown up before our eyes and the suffering seems latent in the air.
In these two cases, both the Muslim women and the immigrants from the East, both groups are doubly marginalised: Van Balen deals with the subject directly, with no manipulation or scene-setting, letting the face, the expression, the softest and most minimal expression, talk to us from the photograph. Pero al margen de sus vestimentas, ajenos a sus nacionalidades y al paisaje que pueda servir de fondo, en todos estos retratos de lo que se habla es de la vulnerabilidad de la adolescencia.
Her subject has always been adolescence, young people of both sexes. Her method of study and achieving greater depth has always been the portrait, a portrait which is almost always a full frontal, direct, and which denudes the model beyond the reality of his or her own physical body. As if this were a very particular catalogue, Dijkstra has photographed these young people in different series, on beaches, always in front of the sea, in bathing costumes, and far removed from the traditional canons of beauty, in schools, and in gardens where they stroll.
She has also photographed young mothers with their babies in their arms, as if they were dolls, and recently she has also photographed young Israeli soldiers and the French foreign legion. But quite apart from their clothing, divorced from their nationalities and the landscape which may serve as a background, in all these portraits what we are dealing with is the vulnerability of adolescence. Israeli soldiers, Portuguese bullfighters, adolescent mothers, young girls at the discotheque, bathers; they all transmit with their still immature bodies, their faces covered with spots, with that unmistakable bodily gesture, the insecurity of their age.
They are fragile, isolated beings — even though they may belong to more specific groups — at a transitional phase. Photography marks a cold distance for observation, it does not establish any relationship with its characters. Simply, as if in a process of cataloguing, she photographs them and offers them to us, serious, standing firm in front of the camera, looking fixedly at us, presenting themselves as transparent beings, beings who will never again be the same because change is imminent.
It is as if they were about to shed that skin, as if immediately after the photograph they were about to turn into other people who only preserve the memory of what we see at this moment. Fernando Moleres Hay otra juventud que nosotros, habitantes de un primer mundo aparentemente confortable, no vemos. There is another youth which we, the inhabitants of a first, apparently comfortable world do not see.
Adolescence is not only that mass which queues at the doors of the discos on Friday and Saturday nights. It is not only those who dress in brand name sporty gear, it is also those other young people and children who actually make those clothes in far off countries. Adolescence is also, and in many places it is, above all, a mass of exploited labour; workers with no rights whatsoever who do inhumane jobs at ridiculously low cost; it is the child prostitutes in the Philippines or Brazil, it is the guerrillas in Africa or Latin America, the soldiers in Asia or Afghanistan.
Photography has always concerned itself with that part of reality which has been termed photo-journalism, documentary, report, but the quality of its images and the force and influence it has sometimes had in sensitising us towards specific problems has elevated it beyond this to other levels. Beyond the document itself, the beauty of its images, and the very force with which they are treated makes many of these photographs works of art.
Close to that classicist aesthetics, more influenced by the history of classical painting than that of modern painting, and above all completely divorced from the channels of the art market, these photographs talk to us of the individual in an anonymous way, but nevertheless integrated within a particular atmosphere, within their own day to day landscape. Moleres follows the fortunes of the most underprivileged; those children who have been robbed of their childhood, those adolescents with no future who live in most parts of the world.
The world of work and infancy has served him to document a type of desolate life in the streets of Brazil, amongst the guerrillas in El Salvador, collecting rubbish in Guatemala, or working on the sugar cane plantations of South Africa. During sugar cane harvest, children are subcontracted for others workers, with a minimun salarium, to help them to cut their daily quota of sugar cane. Enrique vive con su banda y algunas veces va a visitar a su madre padre desconocido. Utiliza el dinero para vivir y comprar drogas como pegamento. Enrique lives with his gang and sometimes goes to visit his mother father unknown.
He uses the money to live and to buy drugs like glue. Fernando Moleres Enrique escupe fuego para ganar dinero. San Salvador, El Salvador. Many children without family live in the rubbish dump and work as collecter of iron, cardbox, plastic, aluminium cans or anything with possibilities of selling.
Many of them have addiction to inhale glue. Fernando Moleres Recolector de basura. Vertedero en la ciudad de Guatemala. Street intermediaries offer sex to the tourist with female children of 9 and 11 years old. Willito joined to the guerrilla with eight years, collaborating as courier Since he was ten years, he fights with his rifle. In , he was thirteen years old. Fernando Moleres Willito, miembro del F.
Frente de la Guerrilla Guazapa, El Salvador.
Y ese entrecruce crucial es el joven. Werther es entonces el primer joven de la historia de la humanidad. Demasiado deseo de que la vida propia lo tenga todo, se diga en todas partes, se encuentre con todos sus otros —y los habite, diseminada en ellos. La indiscutida centralidad de la mirada joven.
Se trata de admitir, sin concesiones ni paliativos, la evidente superioridad de la cultura joven. Pero esto es casi un pleonasmo: No es que la juvenil posea respuestas. Un mundo, el mundo, ese escalofriante desplegarse del tiempo en la punta siempre desplazada, siempre en fuga, que dibuja el filo huidizo del presente. Toda juventud nombra esa terrible verdad: La cultura era el instrumento activo de esa presencia recurrente de los antepasados: Podemos decirlo de dos formas: Y toda imagen es estado fijado, arquitectura congelada, grafo, signo. Digamos que se accede a ella antes.
A Que el emerger del capitalismo cultural dinamita las viejas fortalezas constitutivas de argumentos fuertes de identidad. Segundo escenario, por excelencia suyo, del joven: Es eso, precisamente, lo que en primer lugar hace de su aventura un episodio tan inolvidable, un trance de embriaguez tan exquisito.
Una eternidad colmada con haber sido una vez, si lo ha sido intensamente. Before and After the Enthusiasm. Adults do not conceive of the existence of anything beyond experience, of -non experientialprinciples that we devote ourselves to. 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? Youth is —as was man in the Renaissance and the Illustrationa romantic invention.
They began to think seriously, as primordial horizons of the existence of man, death, poetry id est: 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 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: 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: Without it, all youths —in other words: 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: Such an affirmation immediately exacts arguments. If we are speaking of complex operatives adequate to inhabit the world, one must say there are very few left —and they arise in places that, before, only with condescension were considered culture they were habitually labeled as subcultures.
We are now witnessing, however, a rebellion against those lesser, peripheral programs, in an all out assault on the bastions of supposed knowledge. Past are the times of the principality of ancient patrimonial culture based on experience, memory and sedimentary settling of what is already known: Not that youth has any answers. The thing is that in this lacking, youth feels comfortable, in its place. What was said of surrealism some time ago can now be said of the youth culture: Herein is the reason why I do not like to discuss adolescence: But that is a false supposition, defined from the position occupied by one who believes he has managed to overcome it, to leave it behind.
And that is erroneous: It is he who comprehends existence in all its depth; it is he who intuits the scope of the challenge named by the human being. The latter access to a maturation of understanding —is nothing but an indignant deplorable succession of claudicating defeats —the apprenticeship of deception. Then, let us name it with that other more noble label —and painful for everyone who, knowing his heraldry, pales with envy at already having lost it.
The totality of youth can build itself around one single image, one single song lyric.
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It is the complete world concentrated in one complex point, that is loaded with questioning, that beseeches the system in its totality. I can just as well imagine a youth built around the image of an airplane blowing up one of the WTC towers: If it were possible to answer that non. A world, the world, that chilling unfolding of time on the always displaced, always fleeing point that outlines the elusive edge of the present.
All youths utter that terrible truth: There is no real knowledge of the world —where one looks somewhere other than forward, as did Rimbaud, the fortuneteller. For this reason, and not only potentially, every youth is the messiah —a live promise that the world is being saved, has been saved in him, will always be saved in its infinite possible transformations —at every instant.
There is a transformation underway, of the meaning of culture in current societies, which causes its entire old antiquated signification to vanish into the air. We could describe it as the coming RAM of contemporary culture. Up until very recent times, indeed, the meaning of culture was the construction of filed memories, ROM devices —memories accessible for reading- that permitted safeguarding the past, its sedimentation as a dispatch toward our present. Culture was the active instrument of that recurring presence of ancestors: But the new cultures are only RAM devices, process memories —not sedimentary, not archival- not reproductive.
There is less and less need for archives, all the information is found on line, is merely operative, horizontal. All relevant data is active in the operational mechanics itself, in the programming it processes. There is no tradition; there is no memory —except for the very memory activated by work, by process. And it is a. The force that moves it is not remembrance, the tension of repetition of what is already known. There are no figures that can contain it —tradition is no longer operative, as a genetic force. The new signs enlighten themselves without the resource of any known forms, not even configured ones.
The repetition of what is identical is no longer the profound structure of the form of our culture —finally, in the history of humanity, a mode of culture appears that does not work under the figures of tradition, of the re-presentation, of the repetition of what is identical. Actually, the idea of post-history is rooted here with all its force. There is nascent culture that is not constituted as an instrument of reproduction of life —of its worlds and modes, but rather, purely and simply, as a production device, as an effective machine of active construction of worlds of new, unknown life.
For the future of humanity, everything is yet to be constructed. We can say it in two ways: This characteristic —which converts production into the blind work of a purely intuitive machinotic, lacking any guidance, any imitative-reproductive-repetitive necessity- grants youth an exceptional power. Like the ICS -understood as a non figural and purely productive machine- he knows how to deal with those purely tensional states, defined as abstract games of forces.
For this reason, actually, the young world always relates poorly with the production of images —and, however, they are at a substantial advantage before operatives such as music, which is strictly abstract, passionate, pure geometry of desire that only configures a tension of meaning in the state of suspension, levitated before being grounded in any identifiable forms … images: That ever fading —suspended- state of the imagery appearing with the purest musicians: And every image is a fixed state, frozen architecture, graph, sign.
Contemporary demographic studies postulate a growing elderly population in the most advanced societies. The average life expectancy in modern societies is constantly increasing, but it does so accompanied by quality demands —which do not imply a prolongation of the stage of maturity, and less so that of old age, but rather that of youth. Even the new elderly class is conceived by all service industries, cultural tourism, engineering of experience as a second youth —not even as prolonged maturity.
Nobody wishes to delay the age of retirement, but to the contrary, to hasten it and gain access as soon as possible to that privileged state of second youth into which the new elderly class is constituted. The territories of definition of experience are virtual and belong entirely to the symbolical order — to the crossroads and the negotiation that the imagination is capable of maintaining with that, ever fading register that we call … what is real.
Let us say that there is access to it earlier. The dominion of childhood is getting shorter all the time: Their imagery of identification is hastily juvenile: Ever more, ever earlier, the child-adolescent is a subject invoked to recognize himself pierced by the tensions that define existence as an interrogation, as an enigma, under a compulsion, impossible to renounce, of authenticity, of meaning —like youth. But behind, around and on top of all that, there is an definitive expansion of the territory of youth, which.
The new subject finds itself continuously subjected to infinite mobility mobility that is territorial, physical, social, economic, of class and beliefs, affective … that makes it extremely difficult for it to consolidate itself as a stable identity. The old Mega-machines that produced sociability — State, Land, Country, Religion, Family,…- that traditionally assumed the charge of producing the subject in a context of solid identification, are demolished like old dinosaurs from another time, seeing their roles displaced and replaced by new micro machines, generators of purely provisional and continuously revised effects of identity, or by identification mechanisms —logos, industries of collective imagery- that are banal and unstable.
From this perspective, that of youth becomes the paradigmatic contemporary way of being. As a response to his demands, a new industry aimed precisely at supplying the subject those instruments of self construction is emerging and growing, an entire industry of subjectivity, of the spirit, whose task is defined in the order of immaterial work —the production of meaning and passion, of effects of meaning and desire- of the affective and intellective work —that defines the new statute of advanced capitalism in the terms of a cultural capitalism.
Indeed, the cultural production assumes all the responsibilities regarding the processes of subjection, identity production and its inscription in collective communal contexts. If youth defined as a subject undergoing the process of auto-production is. In a direct syllogism: The emergence of cultural capitalism dynamites the old strongholds constitutive of forceful arguments of identity.
Ergo, contemporary societies are constituted as risk societies, for which every subject becoming is a work —precisely the work of becoming, of managing to be so. That same emergence of cultural capitalism displaces the potentialities and the responsibilities of identity construction toward the cultural industries. Ergo, art is gradually charged with a new political responsibility defined around immaterial work —the production of desire and concept, of meaning and emotiveness -: And inversely, also true: Undoubtedly, the leisure and entertainment industries and cultural consumption Bertrand Desprez Pour quelques etoiles To the contrary, their demands of them exceed any disposition to complacency —the adult stage is more likely to be constituted by claudicating, by accepting the organization of its existence under its empire a trivial empire.
Therefore, Benjamin is right to situate the statute of youth in relation to the expectance of the fulfillment of meaning, in relation to an incomparable greatness of values, in the rejection of the triviality of experience. Their horizon is constructed precisely in the perception of the infiniteness of the possibilities — and their approach to the concrete effect the concrete object, the concrete subject, the person, the chosen life, the inhabited world, the chosen singular projects that expectation to recognize in it the presence of the series, of the virtual infinity to which they belong, of the universe in which they find meaning, and the fact that through each specific singularity they express themselves… Three scenarios —to conclude- in which this projection of the virtual infinity of what is possible in the concrete singular is specified, is incarnated —like scenarios characteristic of the life of youth, of their own culture: The first, the face —there is no scenario as scrutinized in the contemporary art that looks at youth.
That flat and frontal look —as characteristic of those first photo booth photographs by Thomas Ruff as of the latest ones by Rineke Dijkstra- shows the youth confronting the scenario of an unaccomplished identity, subjected to the enormous tension of a world in which all the arguments of stabilized differential expression have been swept away, under the present orientation of the reality of the masses. The moment of the young face is the scarcity of features, of a personal gesture; it is zero affirmation. But that zero —that is telling of the absence of a proper noun- is simultaneously tension of virtuality, recognition in the series: