Hopeless Youth!
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HOPELESS YOUTH! Editors Francisco Martínez and Pille Runnel Hopeless Youth! is a collection of studies exploring what it means to be young today. Young people increasingly create their own identities and solidarities through experiences rather than through political or kin affiliations. It is the youth with the greatest hunger of experiences and cosmopolitan referents. Youngsters are hopeless because do not expect help from anybody and demonstrate scepticism about the future. As shown, contemporary youth is characterised by interim responses and situational thinking, developing particular skills that do not exist in previous generations. Beware that these essays will certainly resonate in your morning, afternoon and late night. Estonian National Museum Veski 32 51014 Tartu Estonia HOPELESS YOUTH! Tartu 2015 Editors: © Estonian National Francisco Martínez, Museum Pille Runnel © (Editing) Francisco English language editors: Martínez, Pille Runnel Daniel Edward Allen, © Authors Marcus Denton Layout, copy-editing: Ivi Tammaru Printing house: Greif Ltd Design: Margus Tamm This book was published with the support of the Font: Estonian National Museum. Aestii – official new font family of the Estonian National Museum, designed by Mart Anderson Graffiti on cover: Edward von Lõngus Photo processing: Arp Karm Endorsements Hopeless Youth! makes clear that the writing, thinking and doing involved in punk and hip hop culture, flâneurism, dubstep and techno music scenes, skateboarding, dumpster diving and hitch- hiking, for example, are central to culture on a more-than-mar- ginal level. This collection of essays is bound to be a staple ref- erence for anyone working with groups and individuals defining places on their own terms. Bradley L. Garrett, University of Southampton 5 Hopeless Youth! Hopeless Youth! is a timely addition to a type of scholarship which is proactive, progressive and provocative. The exclamation mark in the title sums it up for me. In harbouring an array of sharp ideas, unconventional themes, creative forms of dissemination and imaginative collaborations, this collection will have its readers repeatedly thumbing through its pages. Patrick Laviolette, Tallinn University 6 Inequality and unemployment increase while resistance move- ments against problematic politics gather momentum. There has never been a more interesting time to examine the concept of ‘youth’ and elaborate on its future. The eclectic mix of authors included in Hopeless Youth! make this collection an important milestone in the discussion of the most important generation to come. Daniel Briggs, European University of Madrid 7 Contents Introduction 15 Hopeless, Helpless and Holy Youth – Francisco Martínez Insights 43 The Southbank Controversy: Skateboarding and Urban Youth in London – Iain Borden 50 The Figure of the ‘Chav’ in a London Satel- lite Town – Elias le Grand 56 Youth Culture No More – Thomas Mader 60 ‘Clubbing’: The Nocturnal Lymph That Flows in the Urban Veins of Europe – Alessandro Testa 64 The Sources of ‘Underground’ in the Berlin House/Techno Scene Economy – Jan Michael Kühn 9 Hopeless Youth! Contents 68 No Bins for the Prissy: Dumpster Divers and Disgust – Aliine Lotman 71 Notes of a Roadsider – Hitchhiking in Eastern Europe – Jürgen Rendl 74 The Politics of Breakdancing – Simon Barker 78 Shifting Identities in Estonian Punk and Hip-hop – Ott Kagovere 84 Urban Ping-pong in Estonia – Risto Kozer 88 Escape to the Amazon – Ivo Tšetõrkin 91 The Age of Comfort Migrants – Gustav Kalm 96 Muutoksii. Second-generation Immigrants’ Movie Workshop in Helsinki – Vesa Peipinen and Panu Lehtovuori 101 Rural Emigration as a Collective Mood in the Interior of Spain – José Martínez Sánchez 104 Feeling Stuck But Eager to Accelerate: Tourism and ‘Cuban Time’ – Valerio Simoni 107 Temporal Marginality – Martin Demant Frederiksen 110 Love in the Time of Low Cost – Caterina Bonora 10 Hopeless Youth Contents 113 Youth and the Subjective Experience of Time – Steve M. J. Janssen Chapters Accelerated 119 1. – Risks and Pleasures in the Youth Activist youth? Scenes in Contemporary Russia. Elena Omelchenko and Anna Zhelnina 141 2. – Young People in Times of Individualisa- tion: From Youth Cultures to Youth Scenes. Mirjana Ule 159 3. – Reassessing Young People’s Liminal Position in Late-modernity. Aurélie Mary 182 4. – Youth Age Groups or Individual Life Courses? – About Differences between Statistical and Youth Affairs Definitions. Ádám Nagy, Levente Székely and Márta Barbarics Apolitical 205 5. – Kristen’s Struggle: Negative Politics, youth? Marginalisation and Multiculture under Neoliberalism. Malcolm James 223 6. – Who Are You Calling Radical? Revisiting ‘Resistance’ in the London Asian Scene. Helen Kim 245 7. – America’s Heroes, Saints and Redeemers: Youth as a Labyrinthine Journey in Nicaragua. Marcos Farias Ferreira 11 Hopeless Youth! Contents Subcultural 266 8. – Old-school Photo Booths and Retro- youth? modernity in Berlin. Francisco Martínez 292 9. – Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Embedded Aesthetics of Acceleration. Benjamin Noys 309 10. – Bassweight: Dubstep and the Trans- national Space of Hip-Hop. Mike D’Errico 331 11. – Russian Punk in ‘The Biggest Village on Earth’. Ivan Gololobov Remediated 349 12. – Late Modernity and Its Discontented. youth? Bert van den Bergh 377 13. – “It's not just another symbol”: Constructing the Boy London Eagle in a Finnish Lifestyle Blog. Riitta Hänninen and Tommi Kotonen 403 14. – Beautiful Transgressions: Thinking the Flâneur in Late-modern Societies. Francisco Martínez Post Scriptum #Chilling 491 1. – Making of: the Challenges of Exhibition Around Town – Production Pille Runnel 508 2. – Architecture According to Children: Tree House World 526 3. – Urban Youth: Studying ’Hanging Out’ When Everything Is Mediated 12 Introduction 13 Hopeless, Helpless and Holy Youth Francisco Martínez1 Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asex- ual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy. (Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’)2 Infinite youth? The next time you visit the bookshop of an airport pay attention to the number of publications employing youth. Be aware, however, 1 Thanks to Marcos, Marika, Patrick, Pille and Siobhan for their comments and encouragement while writing this text. 2 Published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 92. 15 Hopeless Youth! that by looking at the covers you might fall in love with the fresh faces, exuberant poses and happy expressions of people twenty years younger than you. Be aware, also, that aesthetics always entail an ideology. As said by Susan Sontag in the quote that opens this piece, the aim for physical perfectionism is a form of fascism, imposing our ideal of beauty towards others and negating the charming imperfec- tion of the empirical. Today, youth appears as an epiphany of beauty. Such ideal- isation of youth is manifested not only as an embodied desire, but also as the way of being successful in our society: flexible, mobile, always looking fresh and present-centred. Harry Blatterer explains it as a shift from ‘adulthood as a goal’ to ‘youth as a value’, from youth as a life stage to youth as a lifestyle (2010: 64–68). But how do young people negotiate these processes? In Western societies, youngsters seem to be redundant, ‘full of potential’ yet unneeded at the moment. And, nonetheless, young people do not simply fill the space assigned to them by a world that appears external. They create their own tactics, buffers, and solidarities (Pilkington, Omelchenko 2013), contributing to the production of the collective, living, falling in love and falling in despair, exploring the dizziness of freedom in a human way. Young people are active agents, producing new modes of adulthood, reshaping the way the society is conceived, and re-draw- ing what has been already mapped and ruled. Indeed, contemporary youngsters have acquired a practical aptitude preparing them to cope with and manage precariousness, unpredictability and diversity of life changes (for instance, by making few commitments in life and applying an opportunist-tactical logic). They live in a society that encourages competition and is filled with abundant choices, which might produce – if agreeing with Margaret Mead – disturbances and 3 stress. 3 Based on a controversial study of 68 girls on Ta’u island, Mead concluded that the experience of adolescence depended on the subject’s cultural upbringing rather than on biological factors. Mead, Margaret 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow. 16 Francisco Martínez Hopeless, Helpless and Holy Youth This volume develops a cross-cultural research focused on the way youngsters are compelled to choose and make decisions, without knowing, however, which of these decisions will have long-term consequences. Compulsive by character, young people have been the main agent of a modernity that evolved as addicted to speed and newness, to the point of separating youth from being young. Modern societies might learn however from Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Goethe’s Faust. Both characters made a deal with evil forces to keep an eternal youth, at the price of the deprivation of their souls. It can be said that youth has been taken away