The Youngest Person in Any Room [Repost]
This is a repost of a text that appeared on an earlier version of the blog in March 2021. It is the second part of a text in which I read Walter Benjamins famous "Destructive Character" against the backdrop of pubescent identification with and through aesthetic production. In this part I am focussing on puberties that happen outside of the expected timeframe.
W. H. Auden used to say that he always imagined he was the youngest person in any room. I have often felt the same way, and still have dreams in which I fear that my colleagues and friends will learn that I am really sixteen … or twelve … or fourteen.
- Stephanie Burt, ‘My Life as a Girl’
The destructive character is a contradictory character, young and old at the same time. The destructive character is described as cheerful and
the destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things,[1]
Benjamin writes. It is the same confusion of immaturity and maturity that also constitutes puberty. The withdrawal from a fixed condition makes the destructive character pubescent and the pubescent character destructive. This foundational trouble doesn’t only put individuals in states of crisis but also the field of research that deals with them. Nobody knows the causes for puberty’s endocrinal mechanisms, yet the etui-men of puberty sciences know exactly which human bodies are “normal“ and “abnormal“ in regards to their development.[2]
For a variety of reasons, that are too complicated to lay out here or not yet researched on, a secular trend emerged in the last decades, that is that young people start to develop indications of puberty way earlier than they used to when age norms for this process were established in the 1960s. This leads to the “puberty-in-crisis discourse“ that puts puberty science even more under pressure to actively reproduce what it understands as normal. Morally, the public is concerned about young people making risky experiences earlier. Epistemologically, puberty sciences have to justify their discipline under the new conditions. And biopolitically, the significant changes of the beginning of puberty characteristics constitute a challenge to the government of the population. What follows is increasing intervention in young people's bodies and minds to defend the standardized practices of a whole medical profession. That said, puberty is indeed not only a matter of natural microbiological issues, but also a social construction that isn’t limited to a clearly definable and chronological time frame.[3]
***
Taking the trans- from the “transitional phase“ that puberty is described as, not as an “across“ but as a “beyond“ helps understanding puberty not as a phase of insanity between the binary stages of being young and old, but more as an ontological state of trouble and fluidity. While we won't find this kind of deconstructive thinking in Benjamin's destructive character, he nevertheless lays out a portrait of a troubled person that eradicates himself and positions himself “at crossroads.” But crossroads, besides their etymological relation to “across” don’t bring you “across” by definition. Rather they present you with a choice or an obstacle, making you, at a specific point on your way, aware of the sheer condition of your on-your-way-ness:
The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always positions himself at crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.[4]
There is an existentialist pathos in the last sentence of Benjamin’s text that resonates with the pubescent youngster that rides home on the subway, late at night, with headphones covering their ears and a hood loosely attached to the back of their head. But the dark’n’masc voice of a man, who has seen it all shimmers through the line, as well.
The trans- as in “beyond” in transsexual comes to mind when thinking about people that are said to live second, third or sometimes late first puberties. Besides the obvious endocrinological kinship of those trans people who are on hormone (replacement) therapy to those who are told to be in a normal puberty in their teens, I am interested in the social and political implications of this thought. The state of being neither/nor, the fluidity, the paternalization by others who don’t regard you as fully-fledged subjects (yet), who expect you to become set.
But of yourse, making future fixing decisions isn't for everyone. Differing here means a constant re-framing of identities, which produces a vulnerability towards the things that pubescent and transitioning people are longing for or giving themselves away to. That can be gendered or non-gendered objects, music or people. A “narcissism towards the other”, as Andrea Long Chu puts it.[5]
***
No vision inspires the destructive character. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space, the place where the thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without its being filled.
The destructive character does his work, the only work he avoids is being creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy. The destructive character is a signal. Just as a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so is he to rumor. To protect him from it is pointless.[6]
I am not advocating to read Benjamin's ‘Destructive Character’ as a puberty- or trans-manifesto and it is clearly not intended to be such a piece of writing. But what I take away from my latest reading of the text is a figure that is destroying and self-negating, standing on in-stable grounds, probably not standing on a ground at all. Someone who, by desire or accident, by conditioning or longing, finds themself in a position of fluidity that is existential and foundational, contradicting and yet, most importantly, constituting their character. Someone in constant transit, in some kind of puberty that seems to be messing with its standardized definitions.
I might read the text differently when I re-encounter it in years to come. In the meantime, the destructive character might clear away stuff, ruin ruins, make space. And, as Benjamin writes, “someone is sure to be found who needs this space without its being filled.”[7]
- ^ Benjamin, Walter: Reflections – Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York/London, 1978, p. 303
- ^ Cf. Macleod, Catriona Ida and Pinto, Pedro: A Genealogy of Puberty Science – Monsters, Abnormals and Everyone Else. New York/London, 2019, pp. 17-18
- ^ Cf. Ibid.
- ^ Benjamin, Walter: Reflections – Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York/London, 1978, p. 303
- ^ Long Chu, Andrea: Females. New York/London, 2019, p.27
- ^ Benjamin, Walter: Reflections – Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York/London, 1978, pp. 301-302
- ^ Ibid., p. 30