Plants Can Talk to Each Other — Australian Geographic
“Mother always told me, ‘Never eat singing fruit!'”
“I’m in the Milk and the Milk’s in Me:” Getting Into Something You Were Never Out Of
In the following, I attempt to synthesize material from three of the essays in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.
In Karl Steel’s article “With the World, Or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf-Child of Hesse,” he discusses the various manifestations of wolf-children (specifically wolf-boys) in medieval literature, as well as more contemporary stories of children raised by animals.
As might be expected, scholars of children’s literature and children’s studies have a vested interest in stories about wild children, real and imaginary. In particular, stories about wild children who are tamed, successfully or not, force us to consider, as Steel suggests, “questions about the minimal socialization humans require” (15). In his book Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (also cited in Steel’s article), Kenneth Kidd addresses the frequency and significance of these kinds of stories:
As a variously institutionalized symbolic discourse, the feral tale [Kidd’s term for tales of wild-boys], too, has helped set standards for civilization and, unlike the fairy tale, is not restricted to the realm of popular entertainment…[i]t persists especially in children’s literature….The incredulity with which we now greet such stories outside of popular entertainment belies their historical import, as well as the seriousness that used to mark their narration. (3)
Furthermore, as Steel’s examples point out, the real-life attempts to tame wild children do not always have positive results. The fact that the wild-human who is tamed is almost always a child parallels the popular belief that children are born “natural” and must have their animal qualities repressed, removed, or–to reference Steel’s use of Harman’s language–withdrawn.
Essentially, the taming of a wolf-child does not differ too much from the upbringing of a child. The child must be instructed on what and how to eat, that he must wear clothing, and to eschew all of the things considered animal rather than human. For children, this means a change in their treatment of and relationship to their bodies. Julian Yates addresses a similar concern in his article “Sheep Tracks–A Multi-Species Impression.” He points out that attempts to separate the communications of humans in writing and art from communications of animals’ bodies once again privileges humans and fails to “address the question of non-human responsiveness and human reactivity” (200). Yates argues that “[A]ll animals therefore read and write–not with ink but with urine, feces, and so very many other substances” (200).
American children, in particular, are taught to mistrust their bodies, instructed to hide and perhaps even hate their bodily functions. Children are taught to deal with urine, feces, saliva, mucus, and other bodily emissions in hygienic ways, certainly, but they are also taught that these things are not civilized, not human. Most families discuss these things in whispers, using euphemisms, and almost nobody talks about them in public. This is why bodily-function related humor does so well with children (and adults, too, but not to the same extent), as these are the forbidden topics. However, the fact that such concerns are forbidden also generates shame; even eating food assumes innumerable moral judgments, and the fear of eating in public is among the most common phobias.
These functions serve as constant reminders that humans are animals, and training children to pretend their animal bodies do not exist reasserts the hierarchy that insists humans are separate and above animals. As Steel observes, the “human imagination thus seeks a body without what it means to be a body, without any of the vulnerability, parasitism, symbiosis, and indeed symmateriality of actual bodies” (24). Such an imagined body repositions humans as superior to objects, animal or otherwise.
Of course, one of the most important physical indicators of a child’s maturity is his ability to walk upright. Babies roll along the floor or crawl, face down, on all four limbs. The wolf-child persists in this behavior even past infancy, as his caretakers also walk on four legs. Steel references a mother wolf who strikes her human cub on the head to prevent him from walking upright–it is something only humans are supposed to do (19). The importance of walking on two legs emphasizes the relationship between literally standing upright and leading a “good, upright life” (Steel 26). While babies crawl animal-like along the floor, forced to look downward, one is expected to stand upright and look toward “heaven” before being considered not only an adult, but as the wolf-boy stories demonstrate, fully human–reiterating the idea of the child as not-quite-human.
The establishment of a hierarchy intersects with Eileen Joy’s discussion of place in “You Are Here: A Manifesto,” specifically the illusions of being in a place that one might eventually find the way out of. The very idea of a hierarchy, of a place within which rules must be obeyed, suggests that there must also be an outside, a place where the rules do not have to be obeyed, or a place that results from the breaking of supposed rules. In the stories of the wolf-children, this separation occurs between the constructs of nature and civilization. In the J G. Ballard short stories referenced by Joy, the separation seems to be between “recognizable objects” and “disembodied forms” (155).
The problem in both cases, however, is that there is actually no separation. There is no inside or outside, no distinction between the natural and the civilized, “nor,” Joy writes, “is there any way to hold the life and non-life distinction in place, nor can we hold the human and nonhuman distinction in place, nor is consciousness necessarily intentional or even ‘superior'” (160).
As with the stories of the wolf-children, children’s literature also seems deeply concerned with breaking out, or rather, not breaking out. It often pushes boundaries between object and human, animal and human, animal and object. Children’s literature even sometimes pushes boundaries concerning the functions of and relationship to human/animal bodies.
An example can be found in Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen.
This is one of Sendak’s most popular and controversial books. At the beginning of the book, the protagonist, Mickey, floats out of his bed, loses all of his clothes, and drifts into a surreal world called “The Night Kitchen.” Here, Mickey is recruited by three chefs to help make a breakfast cake.
Mickey’s experience in the Night Kitchen is a notably corporeal one. Once he leaves his bed at home, he is naked without shame, freewheeling and joyful. He falls into a cake batter, where the bakers assume he is milk. The text reads, “And they put that batter up to bake a delicious Mickey-cake.” In this moment of nakedness (something that is frequently code for the uncivilized), Mickey’s body and his food are literally the same object. Later, with his body plastered in dough, Mickey dives into a giant bottle of milk and sings, “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me!” Here he establishes an undeniable companionship–and equality–with the milk. The image is also evocative of another undeniably animal function: a mother breastfeeding her baby.
Mickey returns to his bed at the end of the story, but the last page of the book suggests that Mickey’s adventure is a regular event, stating, “And that’s why, thanks to Mickey / We have cake every morning.” The adventure runs in circles: the world where Mickey can be baked into a cake or be one with milk is the same world in which he can eat the breakfast cake which he was almost baked into. In other words, the narrative does not privilege “real life” over fantasy; it does not even really separate them. Moreover, like the stories of the wolf-boys, it forces the reader to address questions of what it means to be civilized, including a human’s relationship with his body and his food.
Indeed, many children’s books undermine the expected hierarchy that places humans above all else by collapsing a fantasy world, in which objects, food, animals, and people might all play as equals, with a world that can only pretend to maintain the superiority of humans. At the end of many children’s adventures, the message to both the readers and the characters is often that there is no way out. When Wendy leaves Neverland to become a wife and mother at the end of Peter Pan, or Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz wakes up in her farmhouse bedroom, or Max returns home to his hot supper in Where the Wild Things Are, the message echoes Joy’s solemn edict: “There is nowhere else to go” (164). Moreover, the narratives seem to suggest that in order to be happy, the best thing to do is to stop trying to get out.
The three examples above force the child to return home from an adventure–essentially taming him or her by reasserting their proper domestic behaviors. In doing so, the narratives establish a hierarchy that places parents over children, and children over the nebulous and conventionally wild places of their imaginations.
Thinspiration: Bodies and Food as Objects
In class last week, we talked about how American culture seems simultaneously preoccupied with objects and utterly dismissive of them. In a previous post, I attempted to expand Connolly’s idea of “simple objectivity” to explain the need to own, dominate, and use objects, effectively establishing a hierarchy with humans on top, and objects falling into place along their way to the bottom.
Jane Bennett suggests that extreme materialism has led to such an inundation of objects that they begin to lose their meaning and significance, and she ultimately argues for a kind of attachment to objects that would require people to understand the objects’ networks, influences, and agency. In Vibrant Matter, she writes:
[W]e are also nonhuman and that things. too. are vital players in the world. The hope is that the story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology. (4)
In her book, Bennett spends a lot of time talking about food as objects. In my last post, I mention Bennett’s insistence that we look not only at the networks and influences food has in relation to humans, but the influence and agency of the foods themselves. To reproduce the quote:
In contrast to this picture of food as a tool to “be taken possession of if life is to continue,” I have construed food as itself an actant in an agentic assemblage that includes among its members my metabolism, cognition, and moral sensibility. Human intentionality is surely an im portant element of the public that is emerging around the idea of diet, obesity, and food security, but it is not the only actor or necessarily the key operator in it. Food, as a self-altering, dissipative materiality, is also a player. It enters into what we become. It is one of the many agencies operative in the moods, cognitive dispositions, and moral sensibilities that we bring to bear as we engage the questions of what to eat, how to get it, and when to stop. (51)
When Bennett refers to “moral sensibilities,” my first thought concerned food production, transportation, storage, and distribution, all things that directly impact the environment or economy.
However, the reference to morality also makes me consider the popular attitudes toward food and consumption, especially in terms of the cultural expectations of health and beauty largely perpetuated by the diet industry. I’m thinking in particular to discussions of “good” and “bad” foods, and the relationships people develop with food because of these ideas.
These attitudes manifest themselves very clearly in internet forums dedicated to “thinspiration,” or thinspo for short, which includes pictures, quotes, and advice intended to help people (mostly young women) to become as thin as possible. If you’ve never seen it before, be careful Googling it, as many of the images are quite unnerving. I’ve placed the rest of this post after the cut, in case any readers choose not to look at the images I’ve included.
Bennett, Slow Food, and the Invisible Oyster
In Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, she suggests that the slow food movement is one means through which people might become more aware of objects, specifically their food:
The slow food program involves taking the time not only to prepare and savor the food, but also to reHect on the economic, labor, agricultural, and transportation events preceding its arvalri to the mar ket. In this way it endorses a commodity-chain approach to food that chronicles the “life-history” of a food product and traces “the links that connect people and places at different points along the chain.”” This practice provides consumers with better insight into just what is going into their mouths: not only in terms of ingredients such as pesticides, animal hormones, fats, sugars, vitamins, minerals, and the like but also in terms of the suffering of food workers and the greed of agribusiness and its agents in Congress. (Bennett 51)
This seems to intersect with Coole and Frost’s suggestions that we consider the narratives that objects have experienced, as the slow food movement requires someone to consider the origins of her food, as well as the intrinsic characteristics of the foods themselves, as experiences through the handling, preparation, and consumption of the food.
To explore this idea, I’m going to take a different approach to this post and use a first-person narrative to discuss one of my own experiences preparing food. I discuss preparing a gumbo recipe, with specific emphasis on my interactions with oysters.
Transitional Objects, in the Mode of Dirty Wow Wow
Dr. John Cech had us compose our own Dirty Wow Wow photographs and stories. We discussed them in class, but I thought I’d post the images here as well.
The Child’s Object and “Simple Objectivity”
In class Thursday night, we talked very briefly about how our relationships with objects change between childhood and adulthood. This is apparent in children’s intense–sometimes almost mystical–bonds with toys, blankets, pillows, even spoons and dishes. Cheryl and Jeffrey Katz’s Dirty Wow Wow, for instance, chronicles the lives and relationships of fifty “threadbare companions of childhood” in a manner similar to Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects. In fact, the mind-reading bunny mentioned in one of Turkle’s narratives stands as a perfect example of the serious, albeit panpsychic, connection a child might have with an object.
Children’s books also point to this tendency. Some of the most popular books, such as Winnie-the-Pooh or The Velveteen Rabbit, develop the internal lives of typically inanimate objects (stuffed animals), while others like Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins trace the effect objects have on the characters’ lives. Many books encourage children to interact not only with the text, but with the book itself, through popups, moveables, touchables, mirrors, and other gadgets. Moreover, children’s fascination with and unique awareness of objects is also apparent in the success of movies like Toy Story, where not only dolls but piggy banks, binoculars, and tape recorders are provided narratives and motivations.
Indeed, very young children, in particular, participate in a number of behaviors that suggest they have a different relationship and understanding of objects than adults, and object play is a serious area of study for child psychologists. A toddler will just as quickly pretend to be a vacuum as he will pretend to be a dog or his big sister. A child might set up a tea party to which she invites not only dolls and stuffed toys, but Tonka trucks and building blocks, who all consume imaginary tea in perfect equality. (I have a clear memory of adding a plastic piece from the Sorry board game to my brother’s game of action figures.) I have known a child who insisted on setting a place at the dinner table for her favorite stuffed puppy, as well as one who cuddled up to sleep with his hardback Dictionary for Children.
As children mature, they are expected to change this relationship with objects. Indeed, this is once again evidenced in Piaget’s developmental stages, which prove their outdatedness by suggesting that maturity is marked by understanding an object as a separate entity with explainable and demarcated parts. Part of a child’s admittance into not just adulthood but personhood is in her ability to understand herself as distinct from other people as well as other objects: it is adorable for a child to pretend to be an vacuum; it is problematic for an adult, outside of a performance, to do the same.
Considering the discussion Thursday, I have been thinking about the ways in which the attachment to objects is educated out of children. At least in the United States, people do not seem to lose any love for things, but they seem to lose the sense of democracy–we don’t invite the flatscreen TV to the family barbecue.
In my observations, the move seems to be from kinship with an object to mastery over an object. This calls to mind William Connolly’s discussion of “simple objectivity,” and how establishing such an objectivity has become a stronger imperative as, through increased surveillance and insuperable “objects” like global warming, humans become increasingly aware of themselves as objects (189-190). To paraphrase (and perhaps oversimplify) Connolly’s argument: As people are shocked into the awareness that they, too, are objects, many become desperate to reassert their authority and establish what Connolly calls a “simple objectivity.” One can hear the refrains of the modernists in the argument of simple objectivity–there are humans, there are objects, and they are distinct.
Some of this seems to explain the insistence that children abandon their object-egalitarian tendencies. Leaving behind the trusted blankie or imaginary friend, for instance, is often considered a rite of passage. Parents will sometimes even take such objects away from their children in order to encourage them to “grow up.” The frequent panic over children’s fantasy and science fiction also suggests a similar kind of judgment, as such works blur the line between humans and objects for older children in the same way board books or Dr. Seuss blurs the line for younger children. While this is acceptable for babies who do not have to participate in “real life” adult society, it is seen as potentially radical and dangerous for older children.
As children become older, their literature and art becomes more narrative and somewhat more human-centric. By the time children becomes preteens or teenagers, very few books targeted to their age-group have objects or even animals as main characters. More significantly, formal education in public schools focuses less and less on subjects–such as literature, art, and other humanities–that might encourage a kind of object-oriented thinking. Instead, the emphasis is largely utilitarian: how can you use something, how can you make something serve your purposes? I’ve even had teenage students use this exact language: “How will I use this in my cubicle one day?” (That’s verbatim, unfortunately.)
This insistence on a clear hierarchy of owner and owned is essential to establishing a sense of simple objectivity, and it severely impedes any attempts to access objects in order to study them in a meaningful way. I wonder what insights might be gained if children were not so quickly trained to abandon their relationships with objects for the ownership of them.
[Note: this is quite rough, and I’ll be glad to accept any comments or feedback.]
Ontographical Cataloging and Marjory the Trash Heap
In the second chapter of Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost proposes that object-oriented theory use ontography in a way that will, as the subtitle of the chapter suggests, reveal the “rich variety of being.”
Specifically, he quotes Graham Harman’s idea that ontography “would deal with a limited number of dynamics that can occur between all different sorts of objects” (qtd. in Bogost 783), and he continues on to explain how his interpretation differs from Harman’s. Bogost provides a direct explanation of his plan for ontography:
Let’s adopt ontography as a name for a general inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of unit and their interobjectivity. From the perspective of metaphysics, ontography involves the revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering clarification or description of any kind (837).
In other words, ontography is “an aesthetic set theory,” one which examines objects just as they exist merely because they exist. To this end, Bogost explores how various theorists use “the rhetoric of lists” to force the reader to recognize the existence of the objects. Both Latour and Harman, for instance, provide numerous litanies of objects throughout their texts, in which they list one object after another, encompassing everything from mushrooms and monsters to sea voyages and binary stars. (What I just did–that’s one of the lists.)
These lists are interesting because of the work they perform. By listing seemingly unrelated objects, the theorist forces the reader to think about each of these words and the objects they represent separately. Furthermore, the very sound of the lists disrupts the expected grammar; as Bogost observes, “Lists remind us that no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members nevertheless remain utterly isolated, mutual aliens” (871). The lists force us to acknowledge each object as distinct and isolated, when typically we would assume the words to be interconnected; indeed, like any black box, we don’t notice the parts of a sentence until they are not functioning properly.
Moreover, Bogost points out that lists “do not just rebuff the connecting powers of language but rebuff the connecting powers of being itself” (871). Lists, in their plainness, resist the false sense of representation we get from other forms of writing. Bogost also refers to the ways in which photography can draw attention to objects as themselves, separate from their relationships with humans.
As I read this section, I began considering other ways in which we employ ontography. Like the lists, there are certain language experiments and other encounters that force objects to reveal themselves. Bogost identifies a number of these “quasi-ontographical prototypes” in works like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Roland Barthes’ auto-biography, and a song about Trader Joe’s.
This might sound weird (and is certainly a result of my current research interests), but when I read about these lists that force invisible objects to light, or perhaps more accurately, privilege objects and humans equally, instead of focusing on the vantage or experience of the human, I though of Marjory the Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock.
If you’re not familiar with her, she’s a Muppet trash heap that offers sage (if somewhat grouchy) wisdom to the Fraggles.
Her famous introductions almost always include her cataloguing what she is made from: “I’m orange peels; I’m coffee grounds; I’m wisdom!” and “I am all, and I know all!” Marjory reminds the viewers and the Fraggles of her own internal experience as a collection of objects. Just as a list disrupts the “fluid” nature of what seems to be a whole sentence, Marjory breaks apart the illusion of wholeness by offering a litany of her components.
Notably, Bogost says that the catalogues are only a temporary means of disrupting our usually complacent relationship with and understanding of objects. However, like Marjory, the Muppets in general seem to provide an interesting means of challenging our experiences with objects in a more determined and prolonged manner.
Indeed, in terms of morphism, where we are imagining the inner lives of objects, and carpentry, where we are creating artifacts that demonstrate or illustrate the internal experiences of objects, the Muppets seem to be doing some of Bogost’s work–though they do so in an exaggerated, fictional, and (usually) anthropomorphized way. However, I can think of few examples in popular culture that take the exploration of the lives of objects more seriously. Everything from a block of cheese and a birthday cake to mountains, flowers, houses, luggage, and gas pumps appears to assert its existence on an equal plane with humans. In fact, in the Muppet world, humans often (seem to) disappear altogether.
A great example is in a very early Muppet commercial for Marathon Oil, in which gas pumps named “Regular” and “Premium” sing a song that insists that their experience pumping gas is as legitimate as that of the human salesman:
And these are not always just objects being forced into human roles. This commercial is a short, silly example, but throughout the Muppet Show and other productions, both on stage and behind the scenes, care is given to represent the experiences of objects. On Muppets and Men, a history of the development of the Muppet show, includes numerous anecdotes of the Muppet creators arguing over the best way to represent an animal or an object. This is, in a way, the practice of alien phenomenology, by creating a way to access the experiences of things we cannot access.
Importantly, my analysis has focused on the Muppets as characters. If we began to look at the material relationship between Muppets (as inanimate puppets), and Muppeteer, between material and character, between characters and their previous material selves, and so forth, the possibilities become even richer and more sophisticated.
Trash Heap Wisdom
“I’m orange peels, I’m coffee grounds, I’m wisdom!” -Marjory the Trash Heap, Fraggle Rock
Response to “The Well Wrought Broken Hammer”: Breaking Disciplines
In “The Well Wrought Broken Hammer,” Graham Harman proposes a move toward object-oriented literary criticism. In particular, he addresses Cleanth Brooks’ argument in The Well Wrought Urn that a work of literature is a unique object, one which must be considered complete, whole, and independent of the influence of authors, location, context, or any other outside force. Harman identifies many of the problems with this theory, pointing out that making small changes to a text would not, as Cleanth proposes, destroy the “primacy of the pattern” (qtd. in Harman, WWBH 190), or alter the nature of the entire text. Indeed, Harman ultimately argues that “breaking” texts would, as in the analogy of the broken hammer, “allude[ ] to the inscrutable reality of [the text] behind the accessible theoretical, practical, or perceptual qualities” (187).
Harman writes:
Why not imagine it lengthened even further, or told by a third-person narrator rather than by Ishmael, or involving a cruise in the opposite direction around the globe? Why not consider a scenario under which Pride and Prejudice were set in up- scale Parisian neighborhoods rather than rural England—could such a text plausibly still be Pride and Prejudice? Why not imagine that a letter by Shelley was actually written by Nietzsche, and consider the resulting consequences and lack of consequences?
In contrast to the endless recent exhortations to “Contextualize, con- textualize, contextualize!” all the preceding suggestions involve ways of decontextualizing works, whether through examining how they absorb and resist their conditions of production, or by showing that they are to some extent autonomous even from their own properties. (202)
Encouragement for such an approach to literature also appears in We Have Never Been Modern and Prince of Networks, when Latour observes that scholars often develop their entire careers are “fuzzy areas [such as] madness, children, animals, popular culture and women’s bodies” (qtd. in Harman, PN 61), because, as Harman notes, they believe that “modernity has already conquered everything else” (Harman, PN 61).
These divisions are ubiquitous and, indeed, it is nearly impossible to pursue an academic career without ascribing to one. In an effort to move forward, we continue to add new disciplines to spread into areas we feel need to be covered. In particular, I am reminded of my own work in children’s literature, but this applies also to ever-broadening and shifting categories of queer studies, gender studies, posthumanist studies, and so forth.
However, disciplines dependent on the neat categorization and definition of things quickly become problematic. As someone mentioned in the last class session, the shifting ground of queer studies has its scholars reaching to align with as many other disciplines as possible, trying to expand its category and increase its interactions and (hopefully) its stability.
The field of children’s literature often does something similar, frequently trying to find its place in popular culture and gender studies, as well as more traditional fields, in an attempt to anchor itself in a meaningful way. However, I think that children’s literature does this for a different reason.
Queer studies started with a very specific thing to be studied, and now must reach across established borders to pull more things into its categories.
Children’s literature (and childhood studies at large) starts with something immeasurably huge, a category rendered meaningless by the number of questions required to define it: What is a child? What is childhood? Are all children the same? Can we understand children as separate from adults, especially since we were all once children? And there are questions about literature itself: What makes something literature for children? The author? The reader? The language? The content?
Already it is clear how Brooks’ well wrought urn hardly offers a useful analogy, and it is further complicated by the fact that children’s literature is often composed of fragments–bits of song, folklore or nursery rhymes passed by word of mouth, illustrations, textures, many things that cannot be traced to an individual author and source.
Harman’s object-oriented literary criticism, on the other hand, breaks open the expected qualifiers, allowing something as nebulous as children’s literature (and childhood) to be studied without having to orient it to something already established.
Indeed, the scholarship of children’s literature is already home to some kinds of object-oriented criticism. Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence, for example, offers a bold thesis tracing racism concealed in artifacts associated with children and childhood, such as Raggedy Ann dolls and Uncle Tom handkerchiefs. However, she does not look only at the relationship between children and objects, but at the objects themselves, calling them “scriptive things” and exploring how the objects intersect with, react to, and resist one another.
Of course, Bernstein’s work doesn’t quite “break” literature in the way Harman suggests, but it certainly moves in that direction. Ultimately, an object-based approach to criticism might reimagine childhood and children’s literature not as distinctive, but as overlapping, confused, and–importantly–decontextualized. Or, as we discussed in the previous class, to move away from the what and toward the how.
The Children’s Cyborg Manifesto
I’ve been working on this entry since last week’s reading; I’ll have something related to the Harman soon. This is just a really rough outline of some of my thoughts on Haraway and childhood, as well as an interesting new Turkle article I found.
I’ve been thinking about Haraway’s suggestion that the cyborg and cyborg politics could provide a new framework for understanding feminism with all its diversity, contradictions, and general plurality, and I wonder if the cyborg might also offer a new way of understanding of children and childhood. As a category, children are regularly erased. Even as Haraway discusses homework economics and the ever-multiplying responsibilities and identities thrust upon women, children are subsumed as simply another aspect of women’s lives. Yet the discourse of feminism overlaps with childism in many ways. Indeed, one of the ways in which women have been marginalized is by comparing them to children. Childhood is almost always defined in relation to others–adults, implicitly men, especially as girl children are often erased. Just as Haraway suggests reassembling female identity and feminism through the lens of the cyborg, so might the concept of childhood be reconstructed separately from adulthood, especially the masculinized notions of maturity.
Haraway suggests that the “cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity” (27). The notion of escaping or undermining false innocence seems particularly useful. Since the time of the Renaissance, children have been more or less considered a separate category of person, and in the last few centuries, a special emphasis has been placed on protecting childhood innocence. The child is set up as the essence of purity, an asexual, inexperienced creature–the very picture of man in the garden, before the Fall. This is limiting, and can be harmful in that it often denies children agency.
The cyborg-child connection seems obvious for many of the same reasons Haraway relates women and cyborgs. For instance, she talks about how the workers driving the technology industry are overwhelmingly women, and that through their work they “are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies” (29). What she doesn’t mention is that this kind of work is also performed by children, who are often as invisible–or, in discussion of women’s rights, sometimes more invisible–but they have a similar impact on and intimacy with the infrastructure of technology.
Moreover, children’s identities and bodies are considered fluid, the definition of “childhood” changing across cultures and time, and–importantly–intimately connected to a child’s relationship with objects. Until very recently, Jean Piaget’s model of intellectual development was frequently used to understand the development of a child and her eventual movement into adulthood. Much of this model depends on the child’s interaction with objects, chiefly asking, How does a child assimilate an object into her own needs, and how does the child understand an object in relation to herself?
Sherry Turkle addresses this in her article “Cyborg Babies and Cy-Dough-Plasm,” found here. (I’ll also add it to the links page.) She observes that Piaget’s model works well as long as objects, such as toys, can be disassembled and reassembled easily, with each part clearly performing a specific function. I remember that, when I was a child, I used to take apart my father’s ink pens and figure out the purpose of each piece: spring, cartridge, clicker, casing, and then put them back together.
Turkle argues that the advent of computers and electronic toys has challenged this object-oriented development, for if
children today remove the back of their computer toys to “see” how they work, they find a chip, a battery, and some wires. Sensing that trying to understand these objects “physically” will lead to a dead end, children try to use a “psychological” kind of understanding ask themselves if the games are conscious, if the games know, if they have feelings, and even if they “cheat.” Earlier objects encouraged children to think in terms of a distinction between the world of psychology and the world of machines, but the computer does not. Its “opacity” encourages children to see computational objects as psychological machines. (Turkle, “Cyborg Babies)
In other words, computers, robots, and other electronics remove the psychological “self” as a reference for understanding objects.
Because so much of children’s identities seem linked to their relationship or understanding of objects, or perhaps because children are so frequently understood as complements of objects, it seems that Haraway’s cyborg manifesto could, with some adaptation, be altered to offer radical new understandings of children and childhood.
A Beginning
Hello, everyone. It’s been a while since I’ve kept a blog, but I’ve decided to use blogging as a way to work through the challenging ideas of Dr. Laurie Gries’ Nonhuman Theory class. I’ll be posting my own blog entries here, as well as at the class blog, Writing, Theory, and Nonhumans.
I’ll probably also use this space to work through some things for my other courses, as well as my research in general.
Raining Bears and Frogs 