Introduction: Youth Living in Paranoiac Times

Abstract

This is the third book in a trilogy that began with Youth Fantasies (2004), which was followed by Music in Youth Culture (2005). In those first two books, a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework was put to use to theorize the complexity of youth, interrogated to some extent by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (sometimes cited as D+G, but I am not consistent) challenge to Jacques Lacan’s dominant position. I took popular media culture seriously, exploring films, the Internet, video games, and a particular selection of music (gangsta rap, Nü metal, grunge, grrrl culture, techno) to identify what I took to be post-Oedipal developments in youth where postadolescence has been culturally extended to blur clearcut distinctions of adulthood brought about by the global sociohistorical changes wrought by capitalism and its accompanying teletechnologies.

Is psychoanalysis a successful paranoia because it claims to have the last word in every discussion, the decisive explanation to every interpretation, the universal key to opening and closing every problem? Or might its success and inability to laugh at itself result instead from the need to invade all existence for all time?

(François Roustang, “How Do You Make a Paranoiac Laugh?”)