Youth without misery: aesthetics of an economy of expenditure

Abstract

This paper dedicates itself to approaching some ethnographic report excerpts, interviews and images, generated in a universe of marginalized youth cultural practices – especially the piXação and Bate-Bola groups, both very popular in the suburbs and slums of Rio de Janeiro – comparing them with the Turner’s concepts of communitas/liminality and with Bataille’s expenditure. From this empirical and theoretical junction, the paper suggests that such ways of living, indeed some of the most neglected subjectivities of our schools and cities, offer in their performances, in their ethical and aesthetical qualities, good indicators to understanding the epistemological grounds of their incompatibility to the normative prescriptions, i.e., they evidence the economically and libidinally miserable limits of the subjectivity machines that foment their exclusion; precisely because they do not fit in, they overflow. Nietzsche, Castoriadis and Maffesoli, reinforce this work’s theoretical apparatus.

Keywords
youth; epistemology; aesthetics; subjectivity