European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
ISSN: 2325-4823 (Print) 2325-4815 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/recp20
Hopeless Youth! Livia Jiménez Sedano To cite this article: Livia Jiménez Sedano (2016) Hopeless Youth!, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 3:4, 502-506, DOI: 10.1080/23254823.2016.1181331 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2016.1181331
Published online: 29 Jul 2016.
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Date: 13 November 2016, At: 22:27
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Further research is required into the myths of the European project, and this book is a good start among a number of projects that have been paying attention to the ‘meanings’ of Europe. Looking at school textbooks, posters and comics as exemplars of instituting those views and, at the same time, the people of Europe as Europeans (and anti-Europeans), makes up a useful and creative endeavour that should be continued. Bottici and Challand’s developed methodology works well. Moreover, it also makes visible how the past, memory and history are tangible, lived experiences with considerable effects. The view of traditional history offered by the authors may be accurate for conservative viewpoints, but there are, of course, new and different ways of thinking (with) history. I used this volume as one of the recommended books on a History course at the University of Helsinki’s Memory, Identity, and Culture in Europe, where students from undergraduates to doctoral researchers read this and other works from the perspective of how to write history, how to understand what Europe is, and how Europe has been imagined in history-writing. The empirical chapters of Imagining Europe: Myth, memory and identity were very approachable and interesting for all the students. However, the students, who came from Eastern Europe and Finland, did not really recognise themselves in the myths examined here. Rather it was the reflections, visualisations and methods they found interesting, when thinking of themselves as Europeans and as the subjects of history. Emilia Palonen Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland emilia.palonen@helsinki.fi © 2016 Emilia Palonen http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2016.1235775
Hopeless Youth! edited by Francisco Martínez and Pille Runnel, Tartu, Estonian National Museum, 2015, 544 pp., €19 (paperback), ISBN 978-9949548-10-1 Hopeless Youth! explores the great diversity of ways that youngsters are developing in order to cope with the main features of late modernity: instability of the labour market, greater exigence of mobility and rapid adaptation to changing conditions, increasing dismantling of social welfare and the progressive acceleration of social rhythms. The book addresses a central issue in current debates on recent global social changes by analysing ways that the neoliberal agenda affects young people’s lives. As some authors argue, this crisis is not confined to youth, but rather is magnified for them (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001, p. 17). Throughout the pages of this kaleidoscopic book we can see young people resisting, trying to adapt, and/or reinventing themselves to make their lives meaningful in such circumstances. A wide variety of examples from many geographical settings
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and cultural practices provide the empirical basis for the main arguments presented in the introduction by Francisco Martínez. In the first part, Bert van den Bergh invites us to think differently about the increasing number of people diagnosed with depression in the last years: according to him, ‘depression’ is more a logical way of psychological resistance to late modernity’s circumstances than a problem of adaptation to a functional social world. Francisco Martínez analyses the success of old-school photo-booths in Berlin as a way of escaping from an unbearably accelerated present through travelling to a reinvented past where control can be recovered. José Martínez gives another example of escaping from acceleration by examining the trend of running away from the over-busy life of the city to live in a calm rural area. Alessandro Testa presents the culture of clubbing as a phenomenon that has exploded in the last 15 years to escape from accelerated daily life and experience its structural antithesis. Aliine Lotman describes how ‘dumpster divers’ live on food left from the garbage of capitalist over-production, while dreaming of becoming independent from the system by living in self-organised farms. Simon Barker asserts that breakdancing has become a way of free expression for youngsters expelled from the system. Ott Kagovere explains how rap music and hip-hop culture are appropriated by marginalised Russian ‘White Niggas’ after the fall of the Soviet Union. Caterina Bonora covers the aspect of love relations in a period of instability. According to her, for people who travel a lot, live in uncertain circumstances about their future, and have a strong need for individual space and selfexpression, distant relationships are somehow a good solution. Helen Kim, in her analysis of the London-Asian scene, proposes the concept of ‘strategic dissonance’ to characterise the political action of youngsters rather than ‘resistance’, a category that she considers over-used. Ivan Bolologov reflects on the meaning of punk for youngsters in a concrete setting in Russia that he calls ‘the biggest village on earth’. As he puts it, punk rock is not an urban phenomenon, but a way to build an urban lifestyle. It does not involve political claims per se, but a social claim of the right to be different and to follow free individual ways of life. These are just a few examples of a long ethnographic voyage that is organised in the following structure: an introduction, a series of ‘insights’ (brief introducing chapters), chapters organised in thematic blocks, and a ‘post-scriptum’ (three short final chapters on the exhibition at the Estonian National Museum that inspired this book). One of the most relevant dimensions of the neoliberal agenda is the way in which youth has become a symbol of the new times: the slogan of ‘young dynamism and flexibility’ serves to hide the precarity and complicated circumstances of instability, as well as the difficulties that involve learning technologies that are constantly changing. As Francisco Martínez puts it, although youth is idealised as an abstract goal, flesh-and-blood youngsters are excluded from the productive system: they are ‘full of potential yet unneeded at the moment’ (p. 16). In this line of thought, Mirjana Ule exposes a theory of structural changes in youth due to the introduction of neoliberal capitalism. She draws a historical line starting from the social construction of youth in the 1950s and 1960s, going through the creation of strong innovative youth cultures that experimented with new ways
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of life between the 1960s and the 1980s, and coming finally to the fall of youth cultures with the advent of neoliberalism, from the 1990s until the present. According to Ule, what neoliberalism has brought is a new redistribution of power and resources so that young people are deprived of any security or stability. As hopeless youth, they are dependent on their families and elders. In the current context, youth cultures have converted into ‘youth scenes’ or meeting places for sharing consumption practices. Such ‘youth scenes’ are no longer produced and maintained by young people, but by marketers. The ideal of youth is crystallised by becoming trendy consumers and flex workers. Working-class youngsters such as the Londoners or pejoratively-termed ‘chavs’ suffer a difficult situation, as described in the chapter by Elias Le Grand. Because they spend their time sitting about and roaming around the neighbourhood, occupying public space in an unproductive and non-consuming way, they come under suspicion. Borden, in his insight about skateboarding and urban youth in London, describes this practice as an example of the idea that ‘everyone has a right to public space and be creative within it, that we should not have to pay for a coffee or buy something for every moment we exist outside our homes’ (p. 47). Nevertheless, Thomas Mader criticises the way that skateboarding has been commodified for a generation of youngsters with more spending money than previous ones. Has youth become passively apolitical or has political action acquired new ways of expression? Malcolm James asserts that the neo-Marxist and Black Studies perspectives that claim youth has become apolitical in a neoliberal context are mistaken. Such theories assert that before the eighties young people engaged in collective political struggle against injustice and racism, but since Margaret Thatcher, individualism has replaced political action. On this view, with everyone looking after his/her own individual interest, political cultures have become another object of commodification and fashion. In other words, they have been co-opted by capitalism and consumerism. The author counters this idea by proposing that what we usually label ‘anti-social’ behaviour would be better analysed as ‘negative politics’. Nevertheless, new technologies are not only a difficult challenge for young people: they also serve as the new scenario of their social life. One of the most interesting chapters in this respect is the final one by Pille Runnel, which draws on the results of an experiment held with high-school students. She concludes that via smartphone connections, young people create a bubble of privacy in the midst of the public sphere. Transitions from online to offline comprise part of their multi-layered experience of urban life. New technologies have also become the main symbol of accelerated rhythms of everyday life. Valerio Simoni provides us with an interesting example of this phenomenon: Cuba as a crossroad for opposed strategies of running away from and searching for acceleration. Valerio starts by explaining that one of the attractions for visiting Cuba is the idea of seeing the country ‘stuck in time’ before things change, as political relations with the USA move quickly and the country begins to open to the world. From this point of view, it seems rather attractive and exotic to visit a society that is considered frozen in the 1950s. Out-dated technologies and old cars provide tourists with the impression of travelling back in time. What is
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more interesting, as Valerio explains, is how new technologies have affected the subjectivity of Cuban youngsters who are eager to show that they are capable of living an accelerated life. They invest their time and energy in becoming updated in the latest technologies (mobile phones, laptops and gadgets), and acquire them as soon as they can. All these political and economic structural changes threaten the existence of ‘youth’ as a social group. What does it mean to be ‘young’ in such circumstances? When former rites of passage for entering adulthood have become practically impossible to access for most of the population, has youth disappeared as a stage of life? Has it become a state of eternal liminality? Has it acquired new meanings? The authors of the book propose diverse answers to this new problem. Francisco Martínez makes the provocative statement in the introduction: ‘Generational boundaries and threshold experiences are becoming blurred. Coming into age is less and less experienced as a learning passage and more as a process of obsolescence that has to be compensated’ (p. 37). Some authors in this volume respond to this definitional challenge. For example, Aurélie Mary wonders whether difficulties in entering adulthood have made youth into a liminal period longer than ever or if there might be another way to interpret these changes. She relies on fieldwork based on in-depth interviews with female university students aged 20–30 in France and Finland. Her conclusion is that contemporary youth has not become an everlasting liminal period, but rather that the meaning and ways of transition towards adulthood have changed due to structural reasons that include the widespread impossibility of finding a stable job, becoming financially independent, getting married and having children. She states that the problem is that we are trying to understand a contemporary phenomenon with a theoretical framework that made sense in the period after the Second World War. According to her, it is the concept of ‘adulthood’ that is in a liminal state, and not young people themselves. For this reason, this concept should be reinvented, recreated and reworked. Ádám Nagy, Levent Székely and Márta Barbarics claim that statistical categories such as ‘youth’ need to be revised too. According to them, traditional categories of definitive age groups do not coincide with the qualitative dimensions of maturity (defined as biological, psychological and social maturity). They overlap only partially, so that many groups do not fit neatly into any category. In conclusion, we need to rework categories that have for a long time been taken for granted. Let us conclude this review with some critical thoughts on hopelessness and the homogeneity of youth today. Even though most chapters in the book tell us about hopeless people, there is still some light of hopefulness shining in some of the chapters. For example, the ‘dumpster divers’ of Barcelona dream of a utopic future in self-organised independent farms. The youngsters described in the chapter by Elena Omelchenko and Ana Zhelnina (Russian Run, anarchists and Nashi) express their hope in a better future they are fighting to build (each group with different ideals and methods). Marcos Farias writes about current youth in Estelí, a Nicaraguan village in which the ideal of the Sandinista revolution is still alive. Youngsters are oriented towards the goal of resurrecting the revolutionary spirit, even though the revolution itself defeated those who
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fought for it in the past. These are examples of a strong capacity for hoping and fighting for a better future even in rather difficult circumstances. What about other examples that we do not find in this volume, such as the so-called ‘Spanish Revolution’, the ‘Arab Spring’ or the more recent ‘Nuit Debout’ phenomenon in Paris? Isn’t there collective hope? Is there any light at the end of the tunnel? With respect to homogenising conditions for youth all over the world, there is another point I wish to make. Despite the admirable diversity of ethnographic settings displayed in the book, most of the chapters deal with middle-class European youth. However, there are remarkable exceptions, such as the chapter on London ‘chavs’ by Elias Le Grand. Even though, as the authors state, globalisation has made the conditions of young people rather similar in different parts of the world, ways of coping with it are remarkably diverse and plural, and ways of feeling hopeless (or not) differ. Indeed, the volume displays a great variety of examples of this phenomenon. For this reason, I think it would be more appropriate to talk about ‘Hopeless Youths’ in the plural than ‘Hopeless Youth’ in the singular. In conclusion, this book demonstrates the great diversity of ways that young people cope with the conditions of neoliberal late modernity, mainly in Europe and some other contexts. The next challenge is a dialogue with ethnographies carried out in other settings, such as the Arab World after recent revolutions, African postcolonial cities, social movements in Latin America or contexts such as Israel. Hopeless Youth! triggers a rich and necessary discussion based on solid empirical materials and should be considered in current and future debate on these issues.
Funding This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia [grant number SFRH/BPD/87653/2012].
Reference Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. (2001). Millenial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Livia Jiménez Sedano INET-md (Instituto de Etnomusicologia-Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
[email protected] © 2016 Livia Jiménez Sedano http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2016.1181331
