Youthfulness and immaterial labour in the new economy

Abstract

The focus of this article is youth and youthfulness in the contemporary economy. Drawing on theories of immaterial labour, the article moves beyond an existing focus on ‘young people’ as capital accumulating subjects to theorize the production of youthfulness as a quality that circulates through immaterial economies and that is mobilized to confer a particular form of value on consumer goods, service interactions and labouring subjectivities. The production of youthfulness is made possible through relations between the micro-level production and consumption that take place within youth cultures and modes of sociality, the production practices and marketing activities of firms, and young people whose capacities for embodiment, sociability and youthful consumption cultivated both within and outside of paid employment contribute to their constitution as labouring subjects. Within this network of relations, youthfulness is mobilized to distribute playful affects, offer the possibility of hedonistic leisure/pleasure and confer symbolic distinctions of cutting edge style. These economies of youthfulness constitute a specific means by which production, consumption, labour and leisure intersect in the labouring subjectivities and immaterial products of the contemporary service economy, and contribute to the formation of valorized and devalorized youth subjectivities in relation to the new economy.