08 October 2006
adolescents vs. teenagers
Recently, in comments, I was accused of being an 'unsexed eternal adolescent, an abstract conduit for infinite thought' who was now (apparently) having a hard time adjusting the really real world of real women and real men who have really real (er, finite?) thoughts (and presumably also a really real relationship to their bank balance/mortgage/blahblahblah). Far be it for me to side with Kant and suggest that the problem of reality is the very question we have to sidestep for fear of ending up once more in the wretched maw of the Manichean metaphysical machine (idealist! pow! empiricist! erk! bloodied heads litter the battlefield, Hecuba weeps for her sons, promising scientists that they were [note: this riff makes no sense unless you've recently read the A and B Prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason])
Obviously I am made rather happy at the thought of being an unsexed eternal adolescent, as its always struck me that adolescence is nothing other than the quest for truth, a project for which hating the world is the best precondition. Adolescence is the revelation that the world is wrong, corrupt and probably not made for us - it is also therefore the starting point for activisms of all kinds, and all manner of intriguing intellectual obsessions. The self-moulding of adolescents is frequently more interesting than the adulthood we later assume, sinking down into the soft arms of that other great misery, normality.
Teenagers (marketing subcategory, the grotesque 'tween'), on the other hand, are horrid. Or rather, are made horrid. Designed, literally, to proffer themselves to the consumerist cathode ray nipple in a self-abasing whine of boredom and the demand for constant stimulation, the 'teenager' is the sulky, sleepless subject supposed to do nothing other than get addicted to his or her playstation and fiddle about with his or her mobile phone. Teenagers are resentful, debt-ridden and fickle: in that sense, they are well prepared for their future economic roles as er, resentful (someone else is stealing my enjoyment: the tabloid mental jab - don't do anything! don't move! you might get caught!), debt-ridden (the geographical flexibility of the Baby Boomers becomes the financial lock-down of educational movement and the death of class mobility) and fickle (this one, this one, this one, the seriality of desire for the thing that no one wants).
Adolescence against teenagerism! (Particularly the kind of 'late teenagerism' that sees grown men and women abdicating all claim to rationality, the trauma of thought and the very possibility of truth in the name of a protracted, and expensive, solipsism).
Obviously I am made rather happy at the thought of being an unsexed eternal adolescent, as its always struck me that adolescence is nothing other than the quest for truth, a project for which hating the world is the best precondition. Adolescence is the revelation that the world is wrong, corrupt and probably not made for us - it is also therefore the starting point for activisms of all kinds, and all manner of intriguing intellectual obsessions. The self-moulding of adolescents is frequently more interesting than the adulthood we later assume, sinking down into the soft arms of that other great misery, normality.
Teenagers (marketing subcategory, the grotesque 'tween'), on the other hand, are horrid. Or rather, are made horrid. Designed, literally, to proffer themselves to the consumerist cathode ray nipple in a self-abasing whine of boredom and the demand for constant stimulation, the 'teenager' is the sulky, sleepless subject supposed to do nothing other than get addicted to his or her playstation and fiddle about with his or her mobile phone. Teenagers are resentful, debt-ridden and fickle: in that sense, they are well prepared for their future economic roles as er, resentful (someone else is stealing my enjoyment: the tabloid mental jab - don't do anything! don't move! you might get caught!), debt-ridden (the geographical flexibility of the Baby Boomers becomes the financial lock-down of educational movement and the death of class mobility) and fickle (this one, this one, this one, the seriality of desire for the thing that no one wants).
Adolescence against teenagerism! (Particularly the kind of 'late teenagerism' that sees grown men and women abdicating all claim to rationality, the trauma of thought and the very possibility of truth in the name of a protracted, and expensive, solipsism).
