Child as Ideal Origin
This section of Children-Culture-Learning is dedicated to investigating different representations of childhood in contemporary culture. I am primarily interested in how different representations and figurations of childhood are implicated in the material/cultural practices of adult life and the care and education of children. People suffer from knowing too much about childhood, a surfeit of knowingness that turns us into know-it-alls “the speaking subjects of the high proclamatory genres—of priests, prophets, preachers, judges, leaders, patriarchal fathers,” and unfortunately, too many teachers (Bahktin). We speak about childhood in platitudes, commonplaces and cliches. Let me use this first entry to get at my sense at why childhood is swathed in idealized origins and arrogant pronouncements. Later entries will attempt to shine a curious, caring light on important representations and figurations of childhood in contemporary culture.
Figuring childhood as a known entity, safely swaddled up in already determined past, secures people from their own excessive pasts and protects a consumer society gawking at the spectacle of the simulated present, from the fault lines of the future. The “child” and “childhood” have become a kind of elixir of life in how people recapture the past and secure the future. We use children to talk about the future: “ And so for our children and our children’s children let’s do the right thing and….” We use childhood to talk about a lost time no longer available to us except through the invocation of its absence: “ when I was a child the world was green and alive, full of possibility and wonder.” We use childhood to explain the present: “she had a messed up childhood, what else could you expect.” And we use childhood to conjure up the timeless present, unsullied by burdensome regrets and troublesome desires: the image of the child at play lost in the immediacy of his or her engagement with the world. I quote these anonymous cliches not to debunk them, or ridicule them, but to note how representations of childhood and the child are not just distributed in time, but operate in relation to how time itself is conceived in relation to human action and history. Childhood, it seems, can function as a figure for chronology, it allows us to see into the future , memorialize and explain the past, and live in a timeless present. Paradoxically childhood has become a rhetorical “typos” and a symbolic “place,” from which to battle the temporality of human existence. It is suggestive that the word “chronology” is embedded in the story of Chronos who castrated his father and ate his children. He hoped to keep time still. We might hope there is another way to conceive of the relationship between childhood, adulthood and time.
Because of our general unwillingness to acknowledge the unsettling natality of the child, the child’s unknowability and unique potential contribution to cultural becoming and historical change, “the child” becomes the ideal object of a sort of cultural-pedagogical (dream) work. This dreamwork both condenses and displaces group fantasies, fears and conflicts about different versions of individual maturity on the one hand and American communal life and social arrangements on the other. We could push this psychoanalytic/anthropological talk further by describing childhood as it it contemporarily felt as a fetish object simultaneously allowing them (us) to deny and recognize anxieties about adult life. The child is figured as an ideal, pure origin and beginning. This sense of the child as a pure beginning or origin is ubiquitous in this culture and is utilized, worked over, developed, traded, and propped up in a fabulously complex warren of discourses and practices. How do different individuals, perspectives, groups, disciplines, generations, organizations, institutions, world views and discursive formations look to the child and act on children as a pure ideal origin? What claims, practices and methods of proceeding are entailed in these different figurations of the child as ideal origin?
Let’s make a list. Many people “naturalize” the needs and desires of children making children the organic base on which culture works. The child’s needs and desires are placed outside of specific historical/cultural/material conflicts and landscapes of need and desire. The historiography of childhood reports and participates in either the discovery or invention of childhood. From the perspective of developmental psychology the child serves as a phantasmatic origin that grounds a naïve empiricism and allows the scientist and psychologist the observational conceit that one was there from the beginning. This unmarked, unadulterated child functions as a benchmark on which an “empirical,” behavioral archive of the “normal” child can be built. A “child-centered” pedagogy erases the material differences, gradients of cultural capital, and situatedness of particular children and groups of children. The child is used in a series of animal/human\primitive/civilized analogies that establish a univocal story of development and progress. Psychologically the child becomes the site of the adult’s interiority—that place where people go to discover who they are and where they come from. Educationally children are locked into the bright, blank, passive ignorance of the ideal learner and the children’s failures are attributed to familial and cultural “deficits. Politically the child has been used as the focus for a “pronatalism” that abstracts the child from the economic, psychological, and cultural contexts in which the child is taken care of. Culturally the child serves as the support for a variety of critiques and imperatives: it is the site of the adult’s lost youth and obsession with youth culture, beauty and vitality; the crown jewel of a hyperconsumer, class-based, family fantasy/program of acquisition, leisure and survival; and a uniquely dependent human being that both forces the collective nature of human existence upon us and serves a support for moral panics organized around the unique vulnerability of the child.
Origins, beginnings, do not have to be idealized. There is certainly a very prosaic and important sense in which the newborn baby is the beginning of something new: new labor, new hopes, and new ways of thinking about the world and one’s place in it. A classroom of students before anyone has received any grades, children’s eyes looking out onto the world before racial classifications have divided people into races: there is a great and understandable temptation to tell the same old story of a fall from original grace. And the child itself brings with it a new perspective that can only be his or her own. What I am arguing is that the child is treated as an ideal origin, an origin that must be cleansed of any admixtures that would make the child an “adulterated” product. Those of us who have a stake in creating new familial, educational, political and cultural institutions and practices should be wary of the overly easy way in which children are understood as already new, as already constituting a new beginning.
We must be vigilant, like Jacqueline Rose, when she warns us about the “disavowal of material differences which are concealed behind the category of all children.” What is needed is a whole raft of persistent interventions and analyses of how specific acts, activities, events, situations, perceptions, fantasies, fears, interpretations, texts, modes of solicitude, social formations, ways of living and being together, and forms of life, order the relationship between childhood and adulthood, culture and learning. What is needed is a whole movement of artists, scientists, academics, intellectuals, teachers, childcare workers, parents, entrepreneurs, and ordinary, everyday people who care about children and the collective wellbeing of our many communities and the earth. I apologize for this verbose, hyperbolic, shorthand introduction to what I hope will be a series of short, straightforward, helpful, interpretive interventions on the figuration of the child in contemporary culture. I am a teacher, a teacher educator, a parent and a grandparent. I want to be a part of a wider social movement that advocates for the welfare and wellbeing of all children. Let’s learn from one another. One for all and all for one.
Young boy with a toy hand grenade in central park https://sites.google.com/a/nsix.org.uk/asphoto-summer/2-understanding/analysis-and-interpretation/-young-boy-with-a-toy-hand-grenade-in-central-park-1962—diane-arbus
Chronos devouring his children https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
Age of Innocence by Joshua Reynolds
Anne Geddes baby pictures http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/babies/anne-geddes-looks-back-on-30-year-career-in-retrospective-book-small-talk/news-story/67a715ac0fbf3584bd1c689d698b90db
The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction by Jacqueline Rose
Picture of a boy injured in the civil war in Syria, 2016 http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/20/health/children-of-conflict-photos-trnd/index.html