Are the Kids Alright?

Abstract

The Romantic cult of youth and childhood that we discussed in the opening chapters is loaded with a vitalist rhetoric where children are the unique embodiment of the life force of Nature (zoë) upon which the human imagination is believed to depend upon. Metaphorically, they are the phantasmatic and fecund energy that potentially animates all persons regardless of their chronological age. Youth, from this perspective, mediate lived experience and transcendence. The capitalist construction of “youth” since its inception in the eighteenth century has become a fetishized substance—an ephemeral disembodied principle of resiliency and renewal. Postmodern forms of neo-Romanticism now displace the child with postadolescent youth, and place them in a similar position as an objet (objet a)—either too far away (remote and transcendent) or too close (too proximate and monstrous) to attain. Youthfulness is charged with a numinosity that is denied its authority, which usually comes with such quasi-religious objects of transcendence. More often, youth fall within the ambiguous constructions of adult desire like the case of JonBenet, or Calvin Klein’s homoerotic exploitations of youthful eroticism—the teen porn underworld of underwear for the market. They are even characterized as screenagers, “a species in mutation,” which is equated with the progress of technology that keeps adults young. As youthful cyborgs, screenagers exhibit the psychic prosthesis of openness, creativity, flexibility, and curiosity. Without this adults would fall into stagnation, decline, decay, and death—or, so it argued by Rushkoff (1996).¹