Nuevos Horizontes

The Role of Age in Being and Identity

No idiom has yet emerged to capture the collective interests of many groups in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilisations and postnational identities. Such interests are many and vocal, but they are still entrapped in the linguistic imaginary of the territorial state… This vicious circle can only be escaped when a language is found to capture complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance.

(Appadurai 1996: 166)

[End Page 96]

While cultural inquiry related to identity, hybridity, and transcultural value has transformed scholarly practices in recent years, perspectives that consider age as a dimension of aesthetic and identificational experience and textual creation have been comparably absent. A series of explorations on this topic will expand scholarly perspectives on the ways Age, the Aging process, and the distinct phases of life influence the composition of (verbal, visual, and performative) texts. While the lines of inquiry here complement the transnational/cultural turns in theory, they also mobilize new ways to reflect on the nature of creativity and emotion, and how they are codified in writing: using age as an organizing synthesis, this article gestures toward perspectives that link age to aesthetics/poetics, a concept that is largely underdeveloped in traditional Age Studies.

If the way scholars interpret the nature of creativity and the creative process were to include a dimension of analysis based on age, such an approach proposes many relevancies concerning how imagination, experience, knowledge, and emotion (among other axes of being) are influenced and perhaps informed by the phases of life. Such a turn in Age Studies as a field would have shaping effects on the ways embodied experiences are understood and interpreted—factors pivotal in appreciating age as a factor in the creative but also the intellectual process. Underscoring the links between embodied cognition and cultural performance, and suggesting new avenues of reflection for thinking about cultural material, the focus here maintains that age analyses have the latitude to reveal uncertainties across a broad map of cultural disciplines.

Such an approach is a complementary to conventional Age Studies theory, which I will soon discuss, by asking questions about how physiology and culture interrelate, the emotional and experiential influences that inform narrative structure in tangible and intangible ways, and at the ways social sensibilities, cultural experiences, and embodied consciousness change over time. These perspectives add important critical coordinates to the existing body of Age Studies, situating the process of ageing into contexts that open many intellectual and theoretical opportunities to nuance the traditional prescriptions that shape conventional categories of thought, experience, community and performance in relation to age. [End Page 97]

Conventional Age Inquiry: One-Age, All People

Since the 1990s, a significant amount of conventional age-critique aims at disrupting the stereotypes that link age to behavioral expectations. By taking on the implicit associations between conduct and age, many scholars in this subfield have upset the notions embedded in statements like “act your age” by attempting to situate age-performance in ways that transcend culturalist and superficialist views. Much of the theoretical material has been constructed in relation to the notion that chronological age is superfluous, inaccurate and misleading when applied to cultural fields: there is one age, or a universal agelessness, upon and around which are a structure of behavioral scaffoldings that determine “acceptable” action—these may vary significantly from culture to culture, but in conventional scholarship, they require deconstruction in favor of the universalist, one-age motif. Some people have a “dramatic longing for agelessness,” argues Valerie Lipscomb, one that “reflects a well-known phenomenon among older people, that they feel younger than their chronological ages” (2016: 2). These longings, she continues, are generally in response to “The prescription of socially acceptable behaviors” and the ways these are:

associated with chronological age further complicates the performance of age; if a performance falls outside behavioral norms, that person is not acting his or her age and can expect social censure.

(2016: 2).

These norms can transcend social censure, argues Margaret Morganroth Gullette, and have “psychological implications” that derive from “the narrative ideas we have been inserting into our heads” (2004: 11). In the same ways that language speaks us, culture ages us, and does so in ways that channel and thus limit and contain possible spheres of being.

Thus, if we understand age through performative lenses, the social, emotional, and identity implications have many parallels with other culturally constructed phenomena, like gender. In adhering to agelessness (disregarding embodied concerns), our age identities have dimensions of self-construction that are more individualized and allow each person to develop a behavioral social model attuned to their own feelings, agencies, and being. Conventional age studies theory, then, in examining age in these ways, creates tensions between chronology, biology, culture, and society, and offers a broader range of [End Page 98] appreciation that is unburdened (or perhaps decolonized) by chronological/biological/cultural age as a binding qualifier.

A principal supposition in these traditional age approaches is that there is little relevancy in describing cultural age through embodied or lived experiences, because the cultural constrictions only limit and marginalize those who perform outside the behavioral models for their age cohort. The notion of an ageless self, one that is universalized and consistent across time and space, allows traditional critique to undo some culturist “act your age” conventions. But, like other universalist paradigms, one- age approaches push a supposed agelessness onto all people, and thus inaugurates profound maps of exclusion, presumption and marginalization. The myth that all people share “a sense of ageless self, a longing to present a consistent, unified identity” (Lipscomb 2016: 2) is a core supposition in traditional age studies, and it is one that disallows inquiries on the ways culture, aesthetics, language use, emotion, identity, and community sentiments are nuanced by the life experiences. As Cynthia Port notes, asking questions about how age informs (or does not inform, or informs circumstantially) cultural performance, emotion, desire, identity, creativity, among other topics, “runs counter to prevailing positions among most age studies scholars, who often argue against tying age identity to chronological age” (email to the author). Port and Lipscomb note that in conventional critique, a one-age prescription is presumed across disciplines, critiques, theories, perspectives, and interpretations of age and ageing. However, imagining one-age or universal agelessness as a cognitive condition that reaches across cultural performance, social emotion, identificational desire, among many other dimensions of being, overlooks many empirical studies of how embodied cognition interrelates with the human condition.

While some scholars recoil under the presumptions and social conventions surrounding ageing, others feel empowered by it. Traditional age-studies, limited by an ageless/universal utopia, or one-age utopia, reject revelations like that of Sandra Cisneros:

I’m a woman of a certain age. Now I am madrecita. And in Mexico there’s nothing that’s more holy than madre. I am addressed as madrecita. It’s nice to arrive at a certain age and have more respect than a man your age. Here [in Mexico] I feel that I’ve ascended to the level of diosas. Like the Virgen [End Page 99] de Guadalupe. There’s a respect. I can scold boys in the street and they pay attention.

(Quoted in Herlihy-Mera 2020)

If we rely on one-age myths, the distinctive cultural experiences within groups and across them (but also across time, communities, and cultures) are unrecoverable, marginalized beneath the weight of the supposed universality of one-age frames. The one-age prescription obfuscates any such experiences, perspectives and age-cultural nuances, relegating them to their presumed relational tie to the supposed universal age.¹ In this way, the shortcoming of the traditional age-cultural study theory disallows several latitudes of inquiry, including:

1. 1. Age as an embodied and lived experience in cultural and social theory

2. 2. Age as an axis of community, a nongeographic, noncultural, nonpolitical affiliation among people in parallel age cohorts

3. 3. Age as a dimension of identity, one that is nuanced and reshaped in relation to time, contexts, surroundings, and experiences

While Age Studies as a field may have these institutionalized restrictions^,2 recent studies on the same topics in psychology, psychobiology, cultural neurology, cognitive aesthetics, among other fields, dispute the one-age certainty. Taking stock of a growing body of research affords many relevancies and applications to age-related cultural studies. As Yan He et. al. note, “human aging markers” are measurable across “physiological, biochemical and molecular indicators” and these are individuated toward nonuniversal “aging assessments” (2024: 1) When applied to cultural fields, these data provide material necessary for the reconsideration of one-age prescriptions^,3 and they bring cultural and experiential/embodied age studies into meaningful relation.⁴

Foregrounding these largely unacknowledged and often implicit links between culture and age, cultural studies of age and ageing may newly initiate analyses on how growth, experience, maturity and the stages of life have influence on the creative process. A subfocus on verbal narration can be useful for this task, making specific inferences on narration and language use, both thematically and linguistically. Age-centered inquiry is an approach that has the potential to add exciting new maps to the existing topics, [End Page 100] building and adding to considerations of non/Western/World, trans/national, class, gender/sexuality, racial, linguistic, political borders/contact zones, ecocritical, structuralist, Marxist, among other areas, by considering characteristics of texts across “canons” that were composed at specific points in the lifespan. If the cognitive nature of experience, imagination, emotion, and creativity change over time, cultural studies as set of interconnected questions is uniquely suited to take on this task.

Phases of Life as Theoretical Inquiry: Creativity and Age

“Changes in creativity with age,” notes J. Abra, “seem very probable.”⁵ Creativity is often defined as the capacity to bring something new, beautiful, or useful into existence (Maddux and Galinsky 2009). Despite the enigmatic nature of creative insights, many researchers have examined the psychological factors that influence the imaginative process. Studies concerning the ways creativity develops over time (and in function of the ageing process) have yielded compelling data that link cultural studies to age. Many reports demonstrate that creativity evolves in ways that benefit specific intellectual activities (qualitative creative abilities), while other capacities (quantitative procedures) have been shown to decline to a degree. In the context of these data, it is important to note that while “Averages always have exceptions” (Simonton 2016: 1), women scored better than men in almost all scales, including thinking ability, fluency and productivity—and there are outlying scores from in all cohorts on all measures. Nevertheless, Shimonaka and Nakazato observe, “This indicates a developmental shift in creativity throughout the adult years” (Shimonaka and Nakazato 2007: 1). Some of the specific cognitive capacities that have been shown to enhance over time include openness to experience, practicality, and problem-solving, which Shimonaka and Nakazato argue “one’s own subjective and objective experience may influence mature creativity” (2007: 1).

Many recent studies similarly reflect a correspondence between age-creativity variance and the domain of activity. As Diana Bruk notes, among Nobel Prize winners, those who used a “more conceptual approach to their work and tended to use assumptions, proofs, and equations were more likely to hit their creative peak in their younger days” (2019: 1). However, those figures who worked in “experimental” realms tended to have augmented results later in life. Thus, the metric variances relate to the multiplicity [End Page 101] across creativity over the life span: “Many people believe that creativity is exclusively associated with youth,” notes Bruce Weinburg, “but it really depends on what kind of creativity you’re talking about…our research suggests that when you’re most creative is less a product of the scientific field that you’re in and is more about how you approach the work you do” (quoted in Bruk 2019: 1). Weinburg’s attention to domain-specific creativity found discrepancies that amounted to over three decades in creative apexes.

While Weinburg’s work focused on “hard” science fields—including biology and physical sciences—similar reports have been carried out concerning cultural sciences. Philip Hans Franses and others have examined the work of musicians, poets, artists, novelists and others, registering their ostensibly “peak” moments across age of composition, working toward a theory of Humanistic creativity. Similar discrepancies appeared depending on discipline: while studies show poets appear to peak early, historians and philosophers tend to do so much later. While many studies in these topics use large cohorts that exclude contextual information, such as illness, childbearing, economic status, migration, among other particular circumstances, that have been shown to influence creative capacities, the outcomes are in concert to a degree with the findings from other fields, underscoring that age has specific outcomes on creativity—and thus, creativity and cultural production may be understood through ageing process.

As J. Abra oberves, ageing is often shown “to affect creative productivity”—and there are many mitigating circumstances on how and why this occurs. Among the key points to bear in mind from Abra’s study is that “creativity may simply change rather than decline with age, with differing stylistic and thematic concerns gaining priority.”⁶ These stylistic and thematic shifts in cultural activities are linked to lived experiences, changes in interests, among other factors. Over time the brain has also been shown to become “more distractible” and less inhibited “than the younger brain,” both of which are important to the shifts in imaginative activity. As Shelley Carson observes,

Aging brains score better on tests of crystallized IQ (and creative brains use crystallized knowledge to make novel and original associations). These changes in the aging brain may make it ideally suited to accomplish work in a number of creative domains. …Perhaps we as a society should be promoting … transition into a creative field where our growing resource of individuals [End Page 102] with aging brains can preserve their wisdom in culturally-valued works of art, music, or writing

(2009: 1).

Divergent thinking is often cited as a resource for innovation production—and the aged brain has been shown to produce equally divergent thought patterns with fewer related visual ideas, indicating that experience may benefit reduction of dispersed and diverse thought maps down into useable forms (Palmiero et. al. 2014). Some studies also note that as a brain ages, it is able to broaden focus, taking in and interpreting more information from a diversity of sources. “This state of widened attention, notes Carson, “allows the individual to have disparate bits of information in mind at the same time. Combining remote bits of information is the hallmark of the creative idea” (2009: 1).

There are also social concerns to consider with respect to creativity and cultural themes, specifically. Research has shown that mature people have a “diminished need to please and impress others, which is a notable characteristic of both aging individuals and creative luminaries” (Carson 2009: 1). The agency that accompanies ageing allows the brain to develop intellectual patterns without strict regard for external pressures (that is, social expectations), thus opening the opportunities to explore and develop original ideas while free, to a degree, from the behavioral burdens of social norms. As Carson notes, “older individuals and creative types are more willing to speak their minds and disregard social expectations than are their younger, more conventional counterparts” (2009: 1).

In a large sense, these studies demonstrate that as brain activity changes over time, so do its responses to social expectations, external stimulation, and original ideas. The supposed cognitive “decline” from ageing is perhaps misnamed, as creativity as an intellectual domain advances through ageing in ways that not only benefit the production of original ideas but also their development. If Age Studies as a discipline departs from one-age universality, how can studies develop? How can datasets and critique thereof show age concerns across literature, art, performance, and other facets of culture?

Applying Age Frames to Textual Analyses:

Situating knowledge-programs through embodied cultural circumstances provides a register that negates some of the inherent deficiencies in other collective paradigms (like trans/national status, for [End Page 103] instance). Age as an axis for comparative reflection is a theoretical frame that opens many interpretative arenas that are attuned to the human condition in ways that offer grammars to perceive how creativity and thought are expressed in art and text—digital and print—toward questions like: does creativity change over time? Are writers drawn to specific genre—poetry, prose, novel—at specific moments of the lifespan? Are they drawn to print or digital expression at specific ages? Are sentiments articulated in discrete ways as a person matures? If we examine tracts in material culture by age, what exceptionalisms might develop? What “differences” might appear in aesthetic trends among age-groups and across cultures? If reports in neuroaesthetics demonstrate age-group variances (for instance, 25 to 50) how will this shape the nature of cultural study? Would age-specific genres emerge? Are characters, emotions, and community codified in discrete ways as writers mature?

More specifically, in examination of textual performances, a sample example might look at three dimensions of textual creation and expound on the ways age of the author at moment of composition informs each one: (1) linguistic tendencies, (2) narrative themes, and (3) the portrayal of characters of different age groups.⁷ Thus, an age-model of study that focuses on three related spheres could involve:

Such modes of critique are useful as they offer perspectives on subject, form and content, as well as a [End Page 104] specific attention to the age of characters portrayed. Using digital tools can allow for a targeted approach to this form of textual study, divided into subsearches of “title” and “body text”; other topics to be examined by age cohort: most common words (subtrees: nouns, verbs, adjectives, interjections, adverbs, prepositions, articles, and pronouns); number of characters per word; and a thematic tree that locates terms for color, size, weather, and geography. The scheme offers material useful for both description and interpretation. Such a disciplinary frame with an emergent approach would address the frequency with which specific fetishizations, syntaxes, and symbolisms occur, as well as use of figurative language, could be understood as a beginning of a field that rethinks the composition of texts in age terms.⁸

Language Shifts, Outliers, Determining Age at Moment of Composition

When dealing with materials like formally published texts, it is often difficult to ascribe with precision the moment in the lifespan that a text was written; authors often write several texts at the same time, occasionally allowing decades to pass between composition and publication. Linguistic and thematic shifts common to each decade, century, region, and demographic may muddle the intention of the cohort datasets and their comparison. Isolating linguistic units removes them from the context necessary for in- depth analyses. (Translated texts add an additional layer of interpretation.) The meanings of words and the metaphors they construct change over time, and thus the type of observation that such a field of inquiry would likely produce—e.g., an age cohort uses “birth” more often, or in another way, than another—would be mired in a level of abstraction; collections of words, types of phrases, themes, or character-types are not self-interpreting; observing enormous datasets (“distant reading”) risks reducing them to averages that exclude outliers—the most important material may be the outlier. Calculating similarity is information retrieval and visualization; the more complex arguments about cultural change require closer readings that are more attuned to the sensibilities of each author.⁹ Across large sample sizes, these approaches would provide a balanced view of publication in relation to composition date, one that will allow new views on links between age and text, language, performance and the gamut of epistolary cultures and traditions. They would also open scopes in relation to language itself: does age perform textually in the same ways across languages? What linguistic discrepancies arise in comparison [End Page 105] between Spanish, English, and other languages, and when engage in combination? Do authors who write in multiple languages create word-structures in similar ways in relation to age across their linguistic maps?

Such studies promise many unforeseen results and quandaries; and indeed, this is an insightful part of thinking in latitudes of presently non-existent literary studies: to generate what are now inaccessible questions, lines of inquiry, and material for critical reflection. Elucidating the ways linguistic and metaphoric devices appear across their corpuses of texts in specific ways throughout the lifespan, unpacked in comparative cohorts across time, region, language, and other spheres—the frequency with which specific fetishizations, syntaxes, and symbolisms occur, as well as use of figurative language, could be understood as manifest of the nature of authorship in age terms.

Age as a shaping dimension of cultural composition

Engaging these multidisciplinary approaches, the ways texts develop in the mind and are codified into text can be interpreted in relation to an age framework, one that illustrates innovative nuance and newly attuned influences on the creative process. Examining conditions under which creation occurs throughout the lifespan presents a useful uncertainty about textual and other forms of creation and generates new contexts for understanding not only creation and authorship, but also many layers of intra-corpus reflection (early works of a single author vis-à-vis later). The varied realities of embodied aging (in relation to collective and individually) and the ways that they intersect with class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, language, and aesthetics offer fertile ground for new forms of inquiry in literary and cultural study, and across humanities disciplines. In light of the shifting patterns of knowledge-creation—lessening the one-age burdens of traditional studies—a scholarly critique that locates age and the aging process as an aesthetic and poetics mechanism to study, may also be understood as a counterbalance toward some of the preexistent negativities that are often linked to age and aging.

If the ubiquitous digital interconnection that has come to dominate contemporary life calls out for more non-place-focused avenues of inquiry that offer latitudes of being that are detached from traditional discrete collectivities (often articulated as citizen-noncitizen; woman-man; A vis-à-vis B ethnolinguistic/religious/racial [End Page 106] group, and so on)—age is unique and notable, then, not only as a realm of cultural inquiry but also as a communitive and identificational tie, as such a metric transcends these traditional limits—and offers a platform to study peoples across cultures, societies, epochs, and other divisions in ways that are unreachable within existing critical grammars.

Age as a Social Bond:

Thinking about age as an axis of identity and a social bond is also an overture toward new paradigms of reflection about society and community—and generates similar questions: do people perform age as a community bond? Is age a nongeographic identity, a metacommunity that we share with an age group? If so, what are the spans of “group” relation? How can an age group be limited and defined? Are some age groups creolized? What happens to age exiles, when a person identifies with “other” age groups? How often does such a circumstance occur and what conditions evoke it? Is age-group identity, like trans/national and other scales, conditional upon surroundings and context? Does thinking in scales of age change how we understand community, history, being, and culture? How could the cultural and social ontology of each age-group be characterized over time? Would there be in-group and out-group age heroism and villainism? What about age-specific grammars, languages, philosophies, sensibilities, and social logics?

In an applied sense, such questions would be illogical (if not invalid) in one-age universality. In a sense, they represent the social accountabilities age scholars must assume: the responsibility to consider what subject positions emerge from contemporary critical paradigms; to engage transdisciplinary theory to mine new vistas of cultural, individual, and collective being in light of the shift toward embodied cognition; to flesh out and consider new axes of critique, forms of participation, and voices that may be newly articulated (or not articulated) as a result of the existence paradigm shifts in perspectives concerning human conditions and the material cultures that relate thereto. These avenues of thinking about age-realities, age-identities and cultures and the new articulations of distance, individuality and culture that stem from them, together with studies in neuroaesthetics on the same topics, are fecund sites of inquiry¹⁰—and, in these senses, age could arrive as a complementary sector of cultural comprehension [End Page 107] in a very broad sense. (Indeed, age communities exist but are relegated into national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and other groups, often in concert with neoliberal interests.)

An age-based model of knowledge-creation endeavors to disentangle logics of imperialism of place, of transnational failures, of conventional (analogue) social networks, including their limits and exclusions. Such a critical perspective on the intersections of age as an embodied cultural experience can grow from a methodological base balanced between neurobiological, psychology and cultural theory, in order to conceptualize and consider how age and the ageing process can influence aesthetics, poetics, and the ways identity and emotion are codified in textual form over time. Explorations of age as an embodied condition nuanced by social affiliations and cultural contexts offer critical insights into the writing process and also fresh perspectives on how age is performed across discrete spaces, communities, epochs, cultures, and languages. In this way, engaging age as a focus of inquiry develops not only new connections across communities and cultural movements over a span of generations, but also across languages and time periods, undoing some of the prescriptions that are to an extent unavoidable in periodization/transnational/language-group focused and other contemporary theoretical models (including universal agelessness). Age as a cultural metric also has the latitude to nuance geographic, cultural, linguistic, and chronological distances, inaugurating new networks of ties between texts, the communities from which they derive, and authors who create them. By investigating how people think, imagine, and create through age also initiates discourse on what it means to age, and puts forward many relevancies that have historical and critical depth important at the present moment. [End Page 108]