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 "The Brazil of 1920 was a landscape of old men," wrote Nelson Rodrigues in an essay about his childhood in Rua Alegre. "Youths had no function, no destiny. The era could not bear young people" (1). The writer was referring to the marks of respectability and seriousness that every young man was in a rush to acquire.
A man of 25 was already wearing the whiskers, dark clothes, and carrying the umbrella necessary to identify himself with men of 50, and not the whipper-snappers of 18. But a writer of 2030, when he is writing about his childhood in the 1990's, will be able to state: "In my day, everyone was young".
Or to put it another way, for thirty years we have all been young people. In "our" day, youth began to escape from the obedient and guilty obscurity to which medical and moral thought had relegated it. From the very start (I don't need to repeat what has already been written about the Sixties), the phenomenon had the vigor and chaotic beauty typical of the reappearance of something which has been repressed.
"Young" was the signifier for everything that until then had been hidden away in the dark corners of the civilization - the intelligence that dared to think beyond the university canons, the sexuality that came out into the daylight (with the help of the birth-control pill), dispensing with the guilt and the taboos which had caused the anguish and acne of previous generations.
More than just sex, youth was the source of all the erotic or aggressive life drives which impregnated music, politics and mores, in the hope that life could be completely revolutionized, become an art, make itself into pure flux, pure enjoyment. Nietzsche, that old guy with a beard (who thought like an eternal rebel) would have loved it.
But I also do not need to repeat that forces more powerful than the yearnings of one or two generations of adolescents quickly came into play. That the forces of capital - the same forces which inadvertently contributed to arousing sleeping young spirits - sensing an opportunity, were able to reorganize the chaos around the so-called logic of the market.
Being young became a slogan, became an advertising cliche, became a categorical imperative - the requirement for belonging to a certain victorious, up-to-date elite.
At the same time, "youth" revealed itself to be a very powerful army of consumers, free from the moral and religious scruples which regulated the relation of the body to its pleasures, and disconnected from any traditional discourse which could supply criteria about the value and existential consistency of a host of products which, overnight, became essential to our happiness.
The more that we can think of ourselves as young these days, the better. Better for the industry selling disposable trinkets, better for advertising, better for us? The fact is that in the last few decades we have become eternally young. Why not?
If in Nelson Rodrigues' youth every one wanted to be old; if every age chooses a phase of life to symbolize its ideals of perfection, what law, moral or natural should determine the criteria for maturation, patterns of longevity, the limits for what we can demand from or enjoy with our bodies?
If we still do not know what the human machine, made of appetites and language, is capable of, why shouldn't the power of culture, of money, of movies and television freeze five or six generations into a state of perpetual youth?
What is important now is to think about the effects of what we are calling the "teenagization" of Western culture. The first thing which occurs to me is the following: every adult (I am talking biologically here, and not trying to offend anyone) feels a certain guilty conscience about his or her experience of life.
If the standard is living life with the availability, the hope and the yearnings of someone who is 13, 15, 17 years old, what to do with the selectivity, the suspicion and even the consolidation of a certain existential profile which is more defined, something inevitable for someone who has lived 40 or 50 years?
It is true that the youth imperative has the value of forcing us to resist the inertia that the passing of time brings to our bodies, and the proof that this is possible is that 40-year olds now have the appearance of the 25-year olds of three generations ago. But once the mask of youth is put on, the inertia simply moves to another spot.
The matron who used to get old seated in her rocking chair now becomes a bored pin-up on an exercise bicycle. The gentleman who relaxed in his slippers with the newspaper now relaxes at the wheel of his powerful new SUV - that is, if he is indulging in the same exhibitionist idiocy as his adolescent son.
The body may be healthier, but the mental sclerosis is the same. After all, the body is not the only source of inertia - we have to take the stagnating effects of alienation into account.
The adult who sees his reflection in teen ideals feels uncomfortable with the responsibility of drawing his own conclusions about life, and passing them on to his descendants. This means that the niche of "adult" is unoccupied in our culture.
No one wants to be on "that side", the side of the squares, in the conflict between generations, which means that this conflict, for better or worse, has dissipated. Mothers and fathers dance to rock, funk and reggae just like their children, agree with their children about sex and drugs, frequently are found on the transgressive side in conflicts with schools and institutions.
This liberty is only gained at a price paid in parenting: adolescents seem to live in a world the rules of which are made by them and for them, since parents and educators are committed to a youthful lightness and nonchalance.
Not that parents "in the old days" actually knew how their children should face life, but they thought that they knew, and that was enough to delineate a horizon, to set up a code of behavior - even if it was one to be disobeyed.
When parents say "I don't know, dude, do what you feel like doing", the safety net of imaginary protection set up by that which the Other knows falls apart, and experience itself loses meaning.
And as no system for creating discourse about meaning remains empty for long without someone taking advantage of it, the authoritarian State, pure and simple, can come to stand in for the adults who are pretending to be teens. In this case, instead of extrapolating on experience, we will have "reasons of state" (or worse, of the World Bank) dictating what we should do with our lives.
The devaluing of experience empties life of meaning. I am not talking about experience as argument from authority - "I know because I lived it". Especially in a culture so mutable and rapidly changing as our contemporary world, there is little we can teach others from our own experience.
At most, that difference exists. But experience, like memory, produces subjective consistency. I am what I lived. If we throw away the past, in the name of eternal youth, we produce a void which is difficult to bear.
It seems contradictory to suppose that a teen-based culture can be depressive, especially when it is the realm of the senses - adrenalin, orgasms, cocaine - which excites young people. But some times, when the TV and Walkman are turned off, the enormous silence around us worries me.
1. Nelson Rodrigues, "Só os idiotas Respeitam Shakespeare," em O Óbvio Ululante, Companhia das Letras, 1993, p. 158
Maria Rita Kehl is a psychoanalyst, writer and poet, the author of three books of poetry and the books of essays A mínima diferença-o masculino e o feminino na cultura. She was born in Campinas, São Paulo state, in 1951 and is a doctor of clinical psychology. You can reach her emailing mritak@uol.com.br.
Translated from the Portuguese by Tom Moore. Moore has been fascinated by the language and culture of Brazil since 1994. He translates from Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and German, and is also active as a musician. Comments welcome at querflote@hotmail.com.
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So turn on your computer and log in. That's what the internet is there for.
Duh.