The focus of this fifth issue of Electra is young people and youth. Even though the articles included here branch out in different directions, our starting point is the observation that youth as a separate social category is now coming to an end. It has thus been a short-lived invention that is drawing to a strange close – due to the excessive expansion of its domain and the usurpation of its status. Youth is no longer a transitional phase between childhood and adulthood but rather an almost permanent state. It has lost most of the characteristics that tied it to the biological and mental stages of human development to become a predominantly cultural phenomenon. The world is full of ‘young adults’. Youth is two different things at once: an ideal that manifests itself in a world of representations, phantasmagorias and aesthetic and social codes that have become universal and reach across age barriers; and an extended and non-temporary state in an era when gaining independence (by entering the world of work and starting a family) is occurring later and later in the western world.

Youth’s most common condition is associated with a word that is now commonplace: precariousness. The great Russian linguist Roman Jakobson wrote an essay in the 1930s, following Mayakovsky’s suicide and the purge and deportation of Soviet poets, writers and artists, entitled ‘The Generation that Squandered its Poets’. Our generation has squandered its youth, keeping them shut out. This is a disaster – and a cultural one too – which advances silently, a cause of social imbalance and the implosion of institutions (primarily schools and universities). Precariousness as an inescapable condition, on the one hand, and the deep hiatus between an established generation and one which arrived at a time when the idea of the future – the driver of all political and social action – had already lost its meaning, on the other, are the answer to a question that is often asked: why has no collective identity – something similar to a social movement – emerged around youth’s grievances? In other words, why is youth not replaced by a historical subject when the conditions for this appear to have been created?

With youth’s huge political significance extinguished and the ‘spiritual’ – intellectual – force that gave it messianic power at various times in the 20th century (May 1968, for example) expunged, its strength has been confined to profane illuminations of ‘image’. Today, it is noticeable that our imagination has been monopolised by images of young bodies, which almost exclusively occupy the public realm in film, TV, advertising and fashion. It is hard to imagine beauty, health, vitality, sexuality – and all their variations – without reference to the young body. This, then, is the body as it ‘should be’, the body as biopolitically correct. Which brings us to another way of characterising youth, as something no longer defined by an ideal, by a notion of the world (as with post-war youth up until May 1968), but by image. An ideal is something one aspires to and constitutes a policy; it determines action and creates a style. Image, however, leads to passive mimesis, a state at one with the phenomenon of the aestheticisation of society and the forms of meaning that correspond to it.

One of the first and founding stages of the historical invention of youth was the creation of the youth and student movements in Germany prior to the First World War. In Walter Benjamin’s early writings (to give just one example of the many to which we could refer), we find eloquent proof of this mobilisation in the name of a ‘metaphysics of youth’, the intellectual works it gave rise to and the tragic awareness that the outbreak of war generated in these young people who aspired to purity of ‘spirit’ (a word very much in vogue at that time). These youth movements took root in a romantic tradition: to be young at that time signified a spiritual rather than a physical state. The idea of youth, as claimed by these movements, was strictly tied to an awareness of ethical and cognitive values, to an experience of knowledge and sentiment that was intended to guide one’s actions. This whole movement conceived of art and knowledge, imbued with an ethical dimension, as the essential modes of student life. The intellectual, scientific and artistic life of students was supposed to represent a moment of justice and the realisation of history as utopia. The great student cause, as one of Walter Benjamin’s early texts makes clear, was to challenge experience because it was ‘the mask of the adult’, a private mask of the spirit, which signifies the end of ideals and conquering illusions. Experience, said Benjamin, is the culture of the philistine.

A ‘metaphysics of youth’ obviously does not define youth as a sociological category. This important categorisation only arrived much later, in the post-war period of the 1950s and 60s, when there was a huge demographic explosion and rising economic prosperity. Young people demanded their own culture, one deeply marked by pop culture and even counter-culture. This is all a past phenomenon. Today, youth has lost its political and social meaning and gained another whose predominant model is biopolitical correctness. It is not that bodies are subject to violent dynamics on the part of visible, political or other powers. Rather, power in this case is an anonymous and extremely active force that cannot be located: it is everywhere and as coercive as the super-ego that enforces a model and validates the representations of hyper-modern socialisation and the images of desire imposed by it. Clearly, these images cannot be detached from the strategies and effects of the market. But a simple and crude economic explanation is not enough – far from it. The ideally young bodies of hyper-modern western societies enter, fatigued, in an endless race to achieve aesthetic normality. This is represented by a honed, elastic and well-defined body served by a clothing industry and an urban lifestyle that have conquered the world. However, biopolitically correct bodies are shadowed by two anomalies: obesity and anorexia. And old age is the obverse, a negative force now denied by all means.

This model of the young body has imposed itself because it has the strength to mobilise our most potent desires and concentrate aesthetic ideals. In many areas of western life, being young has become an absolute moral and social value – a value to fight for beyond physical and biological limits and the temporal condition of the body itself. We have to fit into the image of a young body that gives the illusion of holding back the tide of decay. In essence, youth is an aesthetic and cultural ideal.

We can foresee a paradox here. In the era of young, biopolitically correct bodies, there has been a notable vanishing of ‘desire’ in theoretical and analytical discourse. Not, clearly, of the impulse per se, but of the word that describes it. This was a key word in literature and theory and one given inflated usage from the early 1960s on. Desire was everywhere. It was a collective investment, a pandemic that very probably came to an end with the outbreak of an epidemic: AIDS. Recalling those times of triumphant desire – stretching from lyric poetry to Marguerite Duras – desire was the driver of the literary word and the guarantee that it had a potency that defied codification. Anyone who reads the literary studies of that time is driven to ask: ‘Did those people think of nothing else?’ It was in this context that Deleuze and Guattari created the famous concept of ‘desiring machines’ (incidentally in a book called Anti-Oedipus) that fed the most fertile theoretical imagination of a generation that had begun to replace revolution with a desire for revolution. As we know, it all ended in huge disenchantment and a deep ‘crisis of desire’. It was very thoroughly and seriously diagnosed but is largely alien to us today. Perhaps it was something that gave rise to an emotional temperament, like that of boredom and spleen for Baudelaire. Is modern day youth – disenchanted, disillusioned and spent, and completely dispossessed of any historical purpose – equipped to identify the pulse that marks our age?

*Translated by Chris Foster