Deleuze and Children 9781474423618

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Deleuze and Children

Deleuze Connections ‘It is not the elements or the sets which define the multiplicity. What defines it is the AND, as something which has its place between the elements or between the sets. AND, AND, AND – stammering.’ Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues General Editor Ian Buchanan Editorial Advisory Board Keith Ansell-Pearson Rosi Braidotti Claire Colebrook Tom Conley

Gregg Lambert Adrian Parr Paul Patton Patricia Pisters

Titles Available in the Series Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds), Deleuze and Literature Mark Bonta and John Protevi (eds), Deleuze and Geophilosophy Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (eds), Deleuze and Space Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen (eds), Deleuze and the Social Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr (eds), Deleuze and the Contemporary World Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (eds), Deleuze and Politics Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (eds), Deleuze and Queer Theory Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and History Laura Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance Mark Poster and David Savat (eds), Deleuze and New Technology Simone Bignall and Paul Patton (eds), Deleuze and the Postcolonial Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan (eds), Deleuze and Contemporary Art Laura Guillaume and Joe Hughes (eds), Deleuze and the Body Daniel W. Smith and Nathan Jun (eds), Deleuze and Ethics Frida Beckman (ed.), Deleuze and Sex David Martin-Jones and William Brown (eds), Deleuze and Film Laurent de Sutter and Kyle McGee (eds), Deleuze and Law Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams (eds), Deleuze and Race Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies Inna Semetsky and Diana Masny (eds), Deleuze and Education Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo (eds), Deleuze and Architecture Betti Marenko and Jamie Brassett (eds), Deleuze and Design Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Jonathan Metzger (eds), Deleuze and the City Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack (eds), Deleuze and the Animal Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody (eds), Deleuze and Children Visit the Deleuze Connections website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/delco

Deleuze and Children

Edited by Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody, 2019 © the chapters their several authors, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2359 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2361 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2362 5 (epub) The right of Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction   Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody

1

Part I: Deleuze and Children   1 Deleuze, Guattari and Partial Objects  Kenneth Surin   2 Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality  Anna Hickey-Moody   3 Undoing the Parent-Function: The Metaphysics and Politics of a Deleuzian Child  Ohad Zehavi   4 Beyond Surface Articulation: Alice and the Hermunculus  Helen Palmer

13 29

47 64

Part II: Children and Deleuze   5 Pathways through the Labyrinth: Deleuze’s Gothic Child in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)  Anna Powell   6 ‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’: Transgender Children and the Breach in the Oedipal Gender Assemblage  Mat Fournier   7 Affective Atmospheres: Joy, Ethics and the Howl of Children and Young People’s (A)Sexuality  Ian Thomas

89

110

128

vi  Contents   8 Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking  Chris Stover   9 Temporalities of Children’s Literature: Chronos, Aion and Incorporeal Ageing  Jane Newland 10 Deleuze, Children and Worlding   Markus P. J. Bohlmann 11 Child, Baby, Embryo, Brain, Monster  Jon Roffe

145

162 179 196

Notes on Contributors 211 Index 214

Acknowledgements

Markus P. J. Bohlmann would like to thank the contributors for their work and patience. He would also like to thank Ian Buchanan for his support. Thanks also to Carol Macdonald at EUP, who believed in this project from its inception throughout its infancy. Anna Hickey-Moody would like to thank Felicity Colman, Helen Palmer and Liz de Freitas for collegiality in the project of thinking children with Deleuze.

 

Introduction

Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody

In light of the more or less recent renaissance of child and childhood studies, children and childhood have received renewed critical attention. Despite this contemporary appeal, however, conventional and often sentimental viewpoints, ideas and concepts prevail when it comes to those we call children. Western thought about children and childhood remains dominated by a developmental, binary logic that juxtaposes children against adults: children are deemed to be innocent, naive and asexual as opposed to the experienced, rational and sexual adult. This binary logic includes the teleology of ‘growing up’ in which children, understood as future adults, are said to undergo a stage-delineated process of maturation that prepares them for being the adult they are supposed to become. On their ascent to adulthood, children are expected to cast off their vulnerable, needy, naive child-identity and to adopt an adult-identity once they have successfully navigated the space that lies in-between childhood and adulthood: adolescence. The binary placement that dominates this thought about children and childhood is set within a continuous developmental framework from child to adult whose built-in discontinuities play out in adolescence: no longer a child, not yet an adult. Herein, the centredness on children serves to camouflage an adultcentrism that makes sure that children grow up to the status quo of the adult in order to safeguard and to repeat this binary logic, and to once again maintain a child’s development towards an adult. The cultural dominance of this developmental model comprises family theories that posit the family as the primary child-rearing and healthgiving unit which children grow up to replicate by having a family of their own. The model of the nuclear heterosexual family here prevails, as Virginia L. Blum has noted,

2  Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody despite the family’s widespread reconfiguration, from single mothers and single fathers to gay couple parenting. Psychoanalysis seems to be especially committed to this model even in the face of its dissolution. Indeed, psychoanalysis is heavily invested in genderizing familial roles to achieve its own prescriptive intrapsychic structures and developmental stages. (1995: 3)

Validating its theories of the child within a widespread cultural acceptance of the nuclear heterosexual family unit as the structure which forms the child, psychoanalysis insists on the legitimacy of the Oedipal (heterosexual) family to endorse its own operational agenda. Psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, is the discourse that is most focused on the child. Indeed, it is in psychoanalysis where the child has found its raison d’être, fulfilling Ellen Key’s 1909 prophecy that the twentieth century would be called the ‘Century of the Child’.1 The twentieth-century child is foremost a child of psychoanalysis. Following Michel Foucault’s dictum that ‘perhaps one day, this century [i.e. the twentieth century] will be known as Deleuzian’ (1970: 885), this volume contends that children and childhood will become known through means which are Deleuzian, which paradoxically depart from epistemologies of ‘knowing’ the child and ask that we may relate differently to children. By this bidding, psychoanalysis and the family are not dismissed but invited to be re-engineered in accordance with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis through their ‘schizoanalysis’. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari critique the family not as the cause of Oedipus, but as an instrument through which Oedipalisation is achieved and maintained.2 The family as a microcosm constitutes a playground for the child in preparation for a wider social field in which the boy-child’s future girlfriend is a reminder of the mother and the girlchild’s future boyfriend is a reminder of the father. The family claims the child for its structure, making the child the focal point around which the family revolves,3 while the child makes the family his or her own sole focal point within a process of triangulation that continues to inform the world outside the family with childhood being a perpetual point of reference. The family thus lays out the conditions for the child’s relation to the social world. Ian Buchanan notes that psychoanalysis upholds the family structure when [i]t assumes that the subject’s place in the world, along with their view of the world, and their way of relating to it, is decided, determined and shaped in the family setting. Psychoanalysis treats the subject as though

Introduction  3 it were perpetually ‘sick from their childhood’. But even more tellingly, psychoanalysis assumes that in our childhood it is only the family that matters to us, that in effect we only have eyes for mummy and daddy, as though all our games, dreams and fantasies revolve around nothing but the shuttered-in trinity of mummy-daddy-me. (2008: 69)

The family becomes the arena where the child’s relations are premised on a heterosexual model that forecloses any bonding outside the family. The mother-child bond as the primary unit of the nuclear heterosexual family prevails, denaturalising any single parent or same-sex couple parenting, that is, male-male parenting in particular. For Deleuze and Guattari, the family is not primary to the realm of the social, but an instrument of the social apparatus employed to perpetuate the subjectification and repression of the subject. The family claims the child, placing the child under the law of the father and its differentiation of the sexes along notions of prohibition and taboo, with castration anxiety and penis envy as structuring principles. The boy-child abandons his mother and identifies with his father to calm his castration anxiety, while the girl-child identifies with her mother despite her penis envy, which the birth of her own boy-child, bringing her the longed-for penis, will settle. The penis is thus passing from the detachable object to the position of a complete object as the thing detached (phallus). This passage implies a subject, defined as a fixed ego of one sex or the other, who necessarily experiences as a lack his subordination to the tyrannical complete object. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 60)

Both sexes are placed under the reign of the phallus by which lack begins to structure desire. The subject views desire as only ever being completely fulfilled in the pre-Oedipal union with the mother, which for the subject is forever out of reach. Desire becomes repressed, as the course of subjectification occurs along the continuum of incest taboo and prohibition: to sleep with the mother and to kill the father become and must be the subject’s hidden desires. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, desire is not repressed, nor is it premised on lack. Desire does not originate with Oedipus. Oedipus captures desire, ‘introducing lack into desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 72), curbing the flux of desire to produce the repressed subject. Oedipus entails desire. Deleuze and Guattari therefore petition ‘to shatter the iron collar of Oedipus and rediscover everywhere the force of desiring-production’ (1983: 53). Desire is productive and transpersonal. It fails to be reduced to and instilled into a directed stream from person to person within an Oedipal matrix. Oedipus, with

4  Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody the arbitrary elevation of the penis to the status of the phallus, appropriates the force of desiring-production for its own orchestration, striates and blocks the flux of desiring-production, restrains desire by putting forward desire as something that is lacking and reproductive rather than as something that is enriching and productive. The psychoanalyst operates within the Oedipal matrix by misconstruing the plurality of desire through ‘the incurable familialism of psychoanalysis, enclosing the unconscious within Oedipus, cutting off all vital flows, crushing desiring-production, conditioning the patient to respond daddy-mommy, and to always consume daddy-mommy’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 92). Upholding an Oedipal familialism, psychoanalysis stifles desiring-production, subsuming the child within an Oedipal framework that posits the family as being primary to the social world and that relates to the world outside the family through the lens of childhood. ‘Yet every psychoanalyst should know that, underneath Oedipus, through Oedipus, behind Oedipus, his business is with desiring-machines,’ remark Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 56). They write: At the beginning, psychoanalysts could not be unaware of the forcing employed to introduce Oedipus, to inject it into the unconscious. Then Oedipus fell back on and appropriated desiring-production as if all the productive forces emanated from Oedipus itself. The psychoanalyst became the carrier of Oedipus, the great agent of antiproduction in desire. (1983: 56)

To liberate desire from this Oedipal stronghold and to render desire productive again become the axioms in Anti-Oedipus and, by relation, for the child who has been caught in Oedipus. Oedipus, then, is the dominant concept in psychoanalysis and other discourses such as early childhood development in which children have become the focus. As a concept, Oedipus has become the default modus operandi by which to approach and to engage with children, a grid into which the child is always already readily placed, subjected to the drama of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex with the help of one of the play’s perhaps most avid readers: Sigmund Freud. The mythical status of Oedipus is largely ignored, and the Oedipus complex, as developed by Freud, gains truth-value in our meaning-production when it comes to children. Children are approached through an interpretational framework that searches for, and makes meaning based on, a predetermined adult understanding of who the child is and what the child must experience based on the adult’s experience as a former.4 The adult’s pre-set

Introduction  5 understanding over-codes the experience of children through a repeated application of an Oedipal lens that looks at children in symbolic terms, where their activities and utterances always stand in for something else and are always a symbol for the phallus, for Daddy. Freud’s Little Hans, for example, a five-year-old boy from Vienna with an expressed fear of horses, might have been afraid of horses simply because horses bite. However, the horse was not allowed to be ‘just a horse’, but achieved symbolic status as the horse was read as a symbol for Daddy and, as such, as an indication of Little Hans’s fear of castration. In this context, Buchanan notes that Little Hans’s father, who was trained by Freud, actually does not listen to Little Hans but immediately places the child’s utterances in an Oedipal frame with the predictable result that no matter what the poor boy says, nothing of what he actually says is ever heard. Not only do Freud and the boy’s father fail to listen to Hans, but they also insist on putting words in the boy’s mouth. (2013: 16)

Buchanan gives the example of Little Hans’s warning to his friend Lizzi not to get near the horses at the train station where they find themselves because those horses might bite, which results in his father remarking, ‘“Do you know, I don’t think you [Little Hans] are talking about horses really, but about widdlers that shouldn’t be touched,”’ to which Little Hans answers, ‘“But widdlers don’t bite”’ (Freud 2002: 17; cited in Buchanan 2013: 16). Though the boy rightfully remarks that penises do not bite, the scene is read in Oedipal terms where biting must mean castration and the horse must mean widdler: Little Hans’s fear of horses must be a fear of having his penis bitten off. Though the boy does not refer to the horse’s penis in the exchange at all, his interaction with and his fear of horses are read in symbolic terms and Little Hans’s utterances and behaviour are ascribed to the signifying realm of Oedipus. In contrast to such a psychoanalytic reading of Little Hans where the boy’s utterances and experiences are interpreted through an Oedipal lens, Deleuze and Guattari offer a schizo-analytic reading through their concept of the assemblage, which does not reject interpretation but offers more open and variable ways of relating to and reading the boy’s experiences than the rigid and fixed Oedipal grid by which Freud operates. Theirs is a shift from representation to affect: Little Hans’s horse is not representative, but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft horse-omnibus-street. It is defined by a list of active and passive affects in

6  Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody the context of the individuated assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepeemaker, pulling heavy loads, being whipped, falling, making a din with its legs, biting, etc. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 258)

Little Hans enters this assemblage where his fear of horses might emerge as a response within the assemblage to the grandeur of horses, the metallic omnibus clattering on the cobblestoned streets, the sounds and visuals of this buzzing street scene of which the horse and Little Hans are a part. Here, the horse constitutes an assemblage of affects associated with the horse: the grandeur and pride of horses, the restraint of the otherwise untamed wildness of horses that is still present in the bridled work horse standing in front of Little Hans. Buchanan, in his article ‘The Little Hans Assemblage’, remarks that this shift from representation to affect still has its semiotic dimensions, for sure, but it is a matter of aggregated signs (populations) rather than ready-made symbols. The horse no longer stands for something other than itself (i.e., it no longer represents Daddy); it is now the aggregated sign of a particular kind of ‘feeling.’ That feeling isn’t defined by ‘horsiness’ or the sense that one is somehow horse-like; rather, it is defined by the affects that in a particular assemblage are associated with horses, such as having one’s eyes blocked, being restrained with bit and bridle, the sense of pride one is nevertheless able to maintain in spite of such restraints, and so on. It is these attributes of a horse’s working life in 19th-century Vienna that resonate for Little Hans, not the fact of its existence. (2013: 16)

It is not the individual horse as a representative of the species Equus ferus that is the matter for Little Hans, but the affects or feelings that he gets, which ‘occur at a level beneath or perhaps before ideation’ where ‘the affects he is experiencing are those we associated with horses, such as being restrained’ (Buchanan 2013: 16). Little Hans experiences the restraint of horses, which connects to his own restraint. ‘These affects,’ Deleuze and Guattari state, ‘circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse “can do”’ rather than what it represents (1987: 257; cited in Buchanan 2013: 16). The restraint that the horse and Little Hans are experiencing circulates and transforms into other affects within the assemblage that the horse and Little Hans are forming with other elements on this street in nineteenth-century Vienna, perhaps an urge for liberation. This Little Hans assemblage, as Buchanan calls it, departs from a symbolic reading where the horse stands for something else and where

Introduction  7 Oedipus serves as a frame of reference. It slips beneath this symbolic trajectory where a sign no longer stands in for another sign, but is placed in adjacency to others, where the words seem initially territorialized, literally the guardians of two inviolate and irrevocable distinct realms. But a kind of sliding contagion occurs, and . . . each term comes to refer to the elements within the original territorial space of the other term. (Polan 1986: xxvii)

Meaning becomes contingent rather than fixed. As a sign, the child enters into an assemblage with other signs where meaning is composed in relation to those other elements, affectively, temporarily and provisionally. For the adult, it is no longer a question of being in a superior position of knowledge in relation to the child, of knowing who the child is based on previous adult experience of having been a child, but of being placed in proximity to the child within an assemblage or what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘childhood blocks’ (1987:  294). Here,  the  child and the adult are adjacent to each other and to something called ‘child-ness’ (Bogue 2010: 95), ‘that is, something that has to do with children’ (Bogue 2010: 96). Child-ness is part of the assemblage but fails to be reduced to the identity of the child. It is not representative, but affective. Like ‘horsiness’, as described above, child-ness does not behove the adult to become or to imitate a child (i.e. to act child-like or childish, for that matter), but it attests to the  affects that we have associated with children, that is, the curiosity and novelty upon waking up in the morning, the wondrous and playful engagement with the world, a freedom of trust in the world’s benevolence and a desire to live and to be alive.5 Child-ness is not intrinsic to the child, nor is it the child’s defining characteristic. It denotes something ‘ineffable; some inaccessible sine non qua without which “the child” could not be conceived’ (Bohlmann and Moreland 2015: 16). The notion of child-ness is open to variants of the socio-historic and cultural constellations and assemblages in which the child has made an appearance precisely through its non-representationality. The child, then, could be conceived of as what Deleuze and Guattari call a conceptual persona. By this term, they do not denote a person or an individual – the actual child in front of us – but an embodiment of thought – the child as an idea and concept that the child is supposed to embody. It is what comes to mind when we hear the words child or childhood. It is a form of thinking about children and childhood generated by the conceptual persona of the child that creates movement of

8  Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody thinking: ‘we do not do something by saying it, but produce movement by thinking it, through the intermediary of the conceptual persona’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 64–5). As a conceptual persona, the child produces movement, engendering discourses about children and childhood, such as the protection and safety of children, their education and development, their political rights, their (a)sexuality, and so on. This production of thought about children and childhood generates adversaries and opponents, affiliates and supporters,6 in a process where the adjective childish may designate a rejection of thought, a judgement, whereas the adjective child-like may designate a permission to thinking albeit on naive and unencumbered terms. The emergence of the child and childhood in our discourses, the presence of the child as a conceptual persona, then, is the response to a problem and to conditions that gave rise to the creation of the concept child, which, however, can only be fathomed through the concept as they are immanent to the concept: Conceptual personae carry out the movements that describe the author’s plane of immanence, and they play a part in the very creation of the author’s concepts. Thus, even when they are ‘antipathetic,’ they are so while belonging fully to the plane that the philosopher in question lays out and to the concepts that he creates. They then indicate the dangers specific to that plane, the bad perceptions, bad feelings, and even negative movements that emerge from it, and they will themselves inspire original concepts whose repulsive character remains a constitutive property of philosophy. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 63)

Conceptual personae emerge as descriptors of the author’s plane of immanence, laying out its conditions, carrying out the affects and percepts and movements that emerge from this plane, which will inspire the creation of the conceptual persona of the child. Conceptual personae take on their own life. They do not belong to the author, but manoeuvre through the author: The philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors [intrecesseurs], the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosopher’s ‘heteronyms,’ and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae. I am no longer myself but thought’s aptitude for finding itself and spreading across a plane that passes through me at several instances . . . The destiny of the philosopher is to become his conceptual persona or personae, at the same time that these personae themselves become something other than what they are historically, mythologically, or commonly. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 64; square brackets original)

Introduction  9 The philosopher becomes his or her own conceptual persona while those are becoming-other than themselves, connecting to other conceptual personae. The child as a conceptual persona emerges in the philosopher’s ideation, mobilising thinking about the child and childhood that goes beyond the philosopher’s own conceptualisation. While the child as a conceptual persona engenders thinking, the child as conceptual persona may further constitute one of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘aesthetic figures’ (1994: 65) within this generation of thought. The child as an aesthetic figure may elicit sensory and emotive responses such as sensations of ease and warmth, triggered by nostalgic childhood memories, frightful recollections and activation of childhood trauma, or sensations of vulnerability or compassion upon encountering the suffering of a child, and so on. The child enters discourses, touching other conceptual personae (e.g. the adult), creating movement of thinking on the edge of the material and semiotic, where ‘every concept is a combination that did not exist before’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 75). Rather than forming a self-contained concept or sign, the child as a conceptual persona is mobile and forms assemblages, such as those compiled in this collection, provoking responses of antipathy and sympathy, while challenging the status quo of our thought about children and childhood. This volume on Deleuze and children, as well as children and Deleuze, generates ways of thinking about and relating to children and childhood that are different from the ones to which we have become accustomed, questioning our accepted wisdom about children.

Acknowledgement We would like to thank Ian Buchanan for reading this introduction.

Notes 1. See Blum 1995: 23. 2. See, for example, Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 119–21. 3. See Ariès 1962: 369. 4. See Blum 1995: 4–5. 5. These associations appear essentialising in line with the Western idea that the child is innocent and blissful, disregarding the trauma that children might face. Yet it is this default conceptualisation of the child as innocent plugged into assemblages that generates affects and percepts, as well as thought that is in tension with this conceptualisation or the concept of the child per se. It is this openness towards different affects and percepts, as well as different ways of thinking, which the term child-ness wishes to capture. 6. See Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 63.

10  Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody

References Ariès, P. (1962), Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. R. Baldick, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Blum, V. L. (1995), Hide and Seek: The Child In-Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bogue, R. (2010), Fabulation or the Scars of History, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bohlmann, M. P. J. and S. Moreland (2015), ‘Introduction: Holy Terrors and Other Musings on Monstrous-Childness’, in M. P. J. Bohlmann and S. Moreland (eds), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 9–25. Buchanan, I. (2008), Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: A Reader’s Guide, London: Continuum. Buchanan, I. (2013), ‘The Little Hans Assemblage’, Visual Arts Research, 39 (1): 9–17. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, M. (1970), ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, Critique, 282: 885–908. Freud, S. (2002), The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, trans. L. Huish, London: Penguin. Polan, D. (1986), ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. xxii–xxix.

Chapter 1

Deleuze, Guattari and Partial Objects

Kenneth Surin

Freud’s metapsychology was in essence a theory of drives, in that it invoked the concepts of energy and structure to show that every human action has its basis in a fundamental and irreducible instinctual ground.1 Two drives were pre-eminent: the sexual drive and the drive for selfpreservation. Connected with the concept of drive was the notion of an object – the psychic economy was populated by a plethora of such objects, with the objects in question being related to the ‘discharge’ of an underlying drive. Indeed, Freud himself was not always clear or consistent on the relation between drive and object, and changed his position in subsequent writings or sometimes said incompatible things about objects in different parts of the same text. Across this inconsistency, the fundamental point remained: the psychic object is a result of the drive, and the relation to an object is the function of a drive’s discharge. For example, the child’s relation to the breast – trusting, untrusting, and so on – serves as a prototype for its subsequent relations to whole objects, such as mother and father. The child’s body, then, is a vehicle for drives, though the relatively unstructured character of the drives ensures they are polymorphous in nature.2 ‘Successful’ psychic development is then construed by Freud and his followers as the capacity of the individual psyche to form relations with whole objects. Subsequent thinkers in the psychoanalytical tradition such as Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm and Karen Horney criticised this emphasis on the individual psyche, and charged Freud with de-emphasising social relations and group ties, despite his attempts to deal with a range of these issues in such works as Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism. Freud was said to have failed to consider adequately the mechanisms that link objects to drives and objects to each other (see, for instance, the work of Klein and Winnicott discussed below). These mechanisms – introjection and projection – are highly

14  Kenneth Surin flexible in their operation, and blend objects with each other, as well as decompose objects into partial or part objects. Object creation can also be enhanced by the particular dealings an individual has with the external world. The positions taken by Deleuze and Guattari on psychoanalysis belong to this deviant or post-Freudian tradition. Perhaps the most significant figure in this post-Freudian movement was Melanie Klein (1882–1960). Klein differed from Freud in her insistence that the drives are not mere streams of energy, but possess from the beginning a direction and structure, that is, they are object-focused. For Deleuze and Guattari, though, Klein remained within the psychoanalytic tradition despite her challenge of Freud’s theorem: while Klein acknowledged the centrality and power of partial objects, with their changes of intensity, their variable flows, and capacity to ebb or explode, she still located the task of interpreting these objects in a contractual relation between analyst and patient. For Klein, the analyst provided an interpretation of these psychic objects in the context of the contract that existed between her and the patient. Even D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971), who moved further from Freudianism than Klein because he dispensed with the contractual relation between analyst and patient, was said by Deleuze and Guattari to have remained within the psychoanalytic paradigm. For Deleuze and Guattari the analyst and patient have to share something beyond law, contract or institution, and while Winnicott relinquished the contract he retained the law and the institution of psychoanalysis. But the primary disagreement that Deleuze and Guattari had with the psychoanalytic tradition was twofold: 1. The work of those who departed from Freudian orthodoxy, such as Winnicott, nonetheless retained an emphasis on transference.3 Even before the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Guattari was critical of transference because: A fixed transference, a rigid mechanism, . . . an obligatory, predetermined, ‘territorialized’ transference on to a particular role or stereotype, is worse than a resistance to analysis: it is a way of interiorizing bourgeois repression by the repetitive, archaic and artificial re-emergence of the phenomena of caste, with all the spellbinding and reactionary group phantasies they bring in train. (2015: 111/79)

2. A second objection arose from the psychoanalytic tradition’s insistence that psychic well-being resides ultimately in a relationship with a whole object, thereby consigning partial objects (the mother’s breast, a strand of her hair, the penis, a whisper, a pain, a piece of

Deleuze, Guattari and Partial Objects  15 cake, and so on) to a necessarily inferior or proleptic position in the psychoanalytic scheme of things – partial objects were always something that one moved on from, a stage that one went through, in attaining psychic maturity. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, partial objects (and even drives) are not mere structural phenomena or stages on a developmental trajectory, but, as they put it in A Thousand Plateaus, are ‘entryways and exits, impasses the child lives out politically, in other words, with all the force of his or her desire’ (1987: 13/21). Psychoanalysis forces the desire of the patient into a grid that can then be traced by the analyst, whereas this desire needs to be kept away from any pre-traced identity or destiny. Only in this way can the patient (and the analyst) engage in an experimentation with the real. But to undertake this experimentation with the real it is necessary to treat psychic objects as political options, and, just as significantly, to refrain from relegating partial objects to a merely secondary or provisional status in relation to whole objects. Deleuze and Guattari make this point in Anti-Oedipus: Ever since birth his crib, his mother’s breast, her nipple, his bowel movements are desiring-machines connected to parts of his body. It seems to us self-contradictory to maintain, on the one hand, that the child lives among partial objects, and that on the other hand he conceives of these partial objects as being his parents, or even different parts of his parents’ bodies. Strictly speaking, it is not true that a baby experiences his mother’s breast as a separate part of her body. It exists, rather, as a part of a desiringmachine connected to the baby’s mouth, and is experienced as an object providing a non-personal flow of milk, be it copious or scanty. A desiringmachine and a partial object do not represent anything. A partial object is not representative, even though it admittedly serves as a basis of relations and as a means of assigning agents a place and a function; but these agents are not persons, any more than these relations are intersubjective. They are relations of production as such, and agents of production and antiproduction. (1983: 47/55)

The emphasis on the partial object’s character as an apersonal and asubjectifying entity is designed to avoid the impasses and pitfalls of the psychoanalytic theoretical armature, with its stress on the entry into the (linguistic) symbolic, and the subjectifying games of the mirror stage. The delineation by Deleuze and Guattari of the partial object as an apersonal agent of production and anti-production (and not merely a representation or a symbolic object) is undertaken via an engagement with three intermediaries or intercessors, namely Lacan and the

16  Kenneth Surin above-mentioned Klein and Winnicott. Where Lacan is concerned, Deleuze early on argued that if, as Lacan claims, the partial object is always ‘missing from its place’ (because qua object before its entry in the symbolic order it could have no such ‘place’), it could never be given in experience, but would instead have to ‘resonate’ between repetitions as differences.4 The ‘missing’ partial object is missing because, constitutively, it can be located in a disjunctive synthesis between two divergent series, and thus it is both perpetually moving and in a mobile, empty space. A Deleuzian disjunctive synthesis of the unconscious does not relate organs to its encompassing organism, parts to an integrating whole, objects to subjects (e.g. a strand of her hair to the mother). Instead, it forms a desiring-machine that directs flows that constitute situations of either lack or excess (Lacan was of course concerned with the former but not the latter). Neither of these situations of lack or excess has a pre-given primacy over the other, since whatever primacy ensues depends on the radically contingent construction of the desiring-machine itself. This emphasis on the fundamentally contingent character of desiringmachines also prompted Guattari to abandon the transference and replace it with the more flexible notion of a ‘transversality’ (about which more will be said later). Lacan, no matter how much he modified and complicated it in his startlingly original topological models of the psyche, always adhered, in principle, to the psychoanalytic perspective’s relating of the object of desire to the phallus, or its lack, the latter necessitated by the Freudian notion of castration. Deleuze and Guattari of course dispensed with castration and all its Freudian theoretical concomitants. Another major divergence between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari with regard to underlying principles lies in their respective approaches to the language-like character of the unconscious. Where Lacan adhered more or less resolutely to the structuralist paradigm of Saussure, Guattari very early on dispensed with the Saussurean paradigm, preferring instead the ‘polyvocality’ of Bakhtin. Later, Deleuze would add C.  S. Peirce to this appropriation of Bakhtinian ‘polyvocality’. The resort to Bakhtin allowed Deleuze and Guattari to espouse a multiple semiosis in which the many-stranded pragmatic dimensions of language, including gestures and cries, could be incorporated. In Logique du sens Deleuze paid close attention to Lewis Carroll’s use of the non-signifying elements of language to create hybrid words that were not part of the English language (‘snark’ = shark + snake; ‘frumious’ = furious + fuming) and sheerly nonsensical expressions (‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe’). These

Deleuze, Guattari and Partial Objects  17 words and turns of phrase possess expressivity, but they do not signify or denote in anything like the customary ways. In fact, their very success as expressivities, albeit of a highly distinctive kind, depends on a radical departure from the routine varieties of signification and representation. Representation and signification, favoured by Saussure and Lacan, have their place, according to Deleuze and Guattari, but must always yield to ‘the higher authority of expressivity’ (Deleuze uses this phrase in The Logic of Sense; 1990: 187/217). For Deleuze and Guattari, the psyche is the name of an open-ended mega-assemblage of desiring-machines producing, as well as being exposed to, experimentation, creativity and becoming. Lacan, they believed, was not ultimately able to accommodate this crucial insight, even if he sought in one way or another to do justice to some of its accompanying features while never abandoning the mainsprings of the psychoanalytic paradigm.5 Deleuze, in line with his emphasis on philosophy’s dramatological aspects (and psychoanalysis for him was philosophical at its core), attached importance to Melanie Klein’s terrifying ‘theater of terror’ in her depiction of a baby at its mother’s breast.6 In Klein’s unforgettable account of this ‘theater’, the baby spends the first stage of its life enmeshed in a swirl of alimentary and excremental, introjected and projected, partial objects, which Klein describes as ‘the paranoid-schizoid position of the child’ (Deleuze 1990: 187/218). Klein, as Greenberg and Mitchell point out in their classic conspectus of the object-relations approach in psychoanalytic theory, was a key transitional figure in moving away from the orthodox Freudian drive model, in which relations with others are activated and framed by drive-gratification, to a relational model, in which relations are treated as fundamental and essential for an adequate understanding of psychic functioning (1983: 119–50). Kleinian partial objects are body parts that infants introject (via the bodily process of orality) into their psyches and then project outward (aggressively or sadistically) because they are threatening. Klein’s innovations regarding the Freudian framework were novel and significant in two ways. She modified and broadened the use of the term ‘phantasy’ (her rendition) from its original sense of a specific compensatory or substitutive phenomenon to a pervasive feature encompassing all psychic activity. Deleuze and Guattari found this theoretical modification somewhat congenial, since it was compatible with their position that the unconscious is essentially productive. Klein’s second innovation had to do with her elaboration of the concept of ‘internal objects’. An array of internalised object relations

18  Kenneth Surin starts to be mobilised as a way of dealing with ‘bad’ psychic objects, a development associated with the child’s assumption of a depressive position as he/she tries to deal with these encroaching ‘bad’ objects. This assumption of the depressive position is a key phase in the child’s development, since it allows the child to move beyond its initial phase of destructive and sadistic introjections and projections (1960: 268–368). In Deleuze’s account in Logique du sens, Klein never avoided subordinating object relations to an oral-anal dynamic, and thus remained inexorably within the Oedipal familial framework. Relations outside the familial framework were excluded. Deleuze pitted the schizoid body without organs against this familial matrix: What the schizoid position opposes to bad partial objects – introjected and projected, toxic and excremental, oral and anal – is not a good object, even if it were partial. What is opposed is rather an organism without parts, a body without organs, with neither mouth nor anus, having given up all introjection or projection, and being complete, at this price. (1990: 188/216)

This insight was given further weight in Anti-Oedipus, where Kleinian partial objects were not subject to any such exclusions. Instead, the partial object does not produce something that is the simulacrum of the human organism (breast, penis, vagina) or subject (mother, father, brother, sister), but impels the ceaseless processes of desire integral to the body without organs. (The term ‘body without organs’ originates from Antonin Artaud’s radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947), and was first used by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense.) In Anti-Oedipus, partial objects thus operate without any organismic or psychic unity that links them, or provides them with a fixed origin or an overarching teleology. To quote Deleuze and Guattari: Partial objects are the direct powers of the body without organs, and the body without organs, the raw material of the partial objects. The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity, and the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive parts that produce the real in space. (1983: 326–7/390; italics in original)

As much as she tried to do justice to the fluidity and fungibility of partial objects, Klein never really abandoned the constraining Freudian developmental triptych with its erotogenic focus – oral/anal/genital – and the associated limitations of its in-built normative heterosexuality.7 Klein’s work with children soon highlighted for her the inherent shortcomings of the typical analytical session where the young child

Deleuze, Guattari and Partial Objects  19 was concerned. With the child’s limited linguistic capacities and need for frequent movement, play provided a better therapeutic context for the young child, rather than the traditional language-based interpretive approach. Winnicott had been a paediatrician before he became a psychoanalyst, and like Klein (who supervised his training analysis) he abandoned interpretive methods, but, unlike her, he also moved beyond them. Deleuze believes Winnicott even has an affinity with Nietzsche: a psychoanalyst like Winnicott truly occupies the limit of psychoanalysis, because he feels that this procedure is no longer appropriate after a certain point. There comes a point when it is no longer about translating, or interpreting, translating into fantasies, interpreting into signifiers and signifieds – no, not in the least. There comes a point when you will have to share, have to put yourself in the patient’s shoes, go all the way, and share his experience. Is it about a kind of sympathy, empathy, or identification? But surely it’s more complicated than that. What we feel is rather the necessity of a relation that would be neither legal, nor contractual, nor institutional. That’s how it is with Nietzsche. (2004: 254–5)

Winnicott pushed the Freudian-Kleinian emphasis on psychic drives gently to one side (he was averse to polemics and excommunications of those who did not adhere to an official line – a marked feature of the rivalries between the various early Freudian schools – and tried always to show continuities between his and their work even when he was departing radically from them8). As Greenberg and Mitchell point out, to do this, Winnicott had to undertake creative ‘misreadings’ of Freud and Klein, which sometimes shocked his friends and close colleagues. Winnicott replaced Freud and Klein’s emphasis on the drive structure with one focused on the child’s psychogenetic environment. To quote from his 1952 essay ‘Anxiety Associated with Insecurity’ (1958: 97–101): before object relationships the state of affairs is this: that the unit is not the individual, the unit is an environment-individual set-up. The centre of gravity of the being does not start off in the individual. It is in the total set-up. By good-enough child care, technique, holding, and general management the shell becomes gradually taken over and the kernel (which has looked all the time like a human baby to us) can begin to be an individual. (99–100)

Or, in the nomenclature of Deleuze and Guattari: ‘there is no such thing as an infant’ (as Winnicott once famously said at a meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, circa 1940), because the baby is an assemblage plugged into an array of other assemblages (mother,

20  Kenneth Surin father, siblings, environment, and so forth). Anti-Oedipus reinforces this point: ‘partial objects are only apparently derived from global persons; they are really produced by being drawn from a flow’ (1983: 46). Winnicott also maintained that the work of Freud and Klein was compatible with his by adopting a classificatory scheme that compartmentalised their respective approaches and methods in a way that showed them to be operating on separate but complementary psychoanalytic terrains. To quote Greenberg and Mitchell: In one of his earliest papers in which he put forth his original views . . . Winnicott makes a tripartite distinction among categories of mental disorder: pre-self disorders (psychotics, schizoids, borderline cases, and false selves) – a dysfunction within the earliest, most primitive object relations; depressive disorders – difficulties with inner-world conflicts between love and hate as characterized by Melanie Klein; whole person disorders (­neuroses) – oedipal conflicts as characterized by Freud. This classificatory system reflects Winnicott’s relation to tradition: Freud was right with respect to neurosis; Klein was right with respect to depressives; Winnicott takes as his own province the relatively unexplored area of psychotic and borderline-psychotic phenomena. (1983: 208)9

While this schema allowed Winnicott to conceive of himself as a nonrival with regard to Freud and Klein, its real interest to us lies in his own self-presentation as someone concerned with the pre-self disorders afflicting psychotics and schizoids. This is, of course, the very category of patient focused on by Deleuze and Guattari in their claim that Freudianism is unable to deal adequately with pre-personal singularities, these being the crux of the psychic constitution of the psychotic and schizoid. Guattari in particular was impressed by Winnicott’s account of ‘transitional objects’: It is a logic of intensities, of auto-referential existential assemblages engaging in irreversible durations. It is the logic not only of human subjects constituted as totalized bodies, but also of psychoanalytic partial objects – what Winnicott called transitional objects, institutional objects (‘subjectgroups’), faces and landscapes, etc. (2000: 44/37)10

This profound intellectual kinship between Winnicott and Deleuze and Guattari notwithstanding, Deleuze and Guattari were only able to proceed so far with Winnicott’s formulations. Winnicott dispensed with a great deal that was central to Freud’s theoretical framework, but he also retained elements that Deleuze and Guattari were quick to discard. Foremost among the latter were the notions of the ‘transference’ and ‘countertransference’. Winnicott was explicit that the patient may have

Deleuze, Guattari and Partial Objects  21 a therapeutic need for the analyst’s hateful feelings (i.e. countertransference) in certain situations: I distinguish the truly objective countertransference, or if this is difficult, the analyst’s love and hate in reaction to the actual personality and behavior of the patient, based on objective observation . . . I suggest that if an analyst is to analyze psychotics or antisocials he must be able to be so thoroughly aware of the countertransference that he can sort out and study his objective reactions to the patient. These will include hate. Countertransference phenomena will at times be the important things in the analysis. (1949: 69–70)

The therapeutic value of the analyst’s countertransference, however, is offset by an important consequence that attenuates the potential impact of the patient’s partial objects. Embedding the patient’s partial objects in the dynamic of transference and countertransference inevitably attenuates their unavoidable plasticity. Partial objects are invariably ‘menacing, explosive, bursting, toxic, or poisonous’ (Deleuze 1997: 14/28). They follow a specific course when they are detached from a whole or from other parts, or when they are collected into other wholes along with one or more other parts. As a result, the question of the specific processes that underlie this detachment or reattachment is crucial. These processes show us whether or not a de- or re-attachment is menacing, reassuring, painful, pleasurable, tranquillising, alluring, and so on. What makes it any one (or more) of these things? For Deleuze and Guattari it is essential that we not confine such processes and their meanings to a transaction between patient and analyst, but do justice to them as very disparate phenomena that move people on, or hold them back, in the courses taken by their lives. Winnicott, by privileging the specific interaction between patient and analyst in responding to the patient’s partial objects, does not escape this confinement. In his practice at the La Borde clinic, Guattari worked with ­schizophrenic patients who were often in states of extreme catatonic withdrawal, lacking the intact subjectivities and egos of the typical neurotic individual of psychoanalytic theory.11 The schizoids Guattari encountered at La Borde, in contrast to Freud’s neurotic patients, possessed mere slivers of subjectivity and profoundly shattered ego-­ fragments that made any kind of focused speech and behaviour difficult if not impossible. Hence, the task of Guattari and his fellow staffmembers at the clinic was to create workable ‘transversalities’ between these different slivers and fragments, creating connectivities between them that would at least be resilient enough to enable a patient to begin to negotiate their everyday world. The Freudian ‘talking cure’ was

22  Kenneth Surin simply unobtainable as a resource for the kinds of patients who came to La Borde, with subjectivities typically too split and disjointed to provide them with linguistic and behavioural ‘receptors’ stable or adequate enough to generate an analytically feasible transference. In the absence of the requisite transference, considerable ingenuity on the part of the therapist was required to help construct transversalities of benefit to patients going through a major and protracted crisis, a case in point here being the following episode involving the Scottish pioneer of antipsychiatry, R. D. Laing, with whom Guattari had an edgy acquaintanceship and a few intellectual disagreements (some important commonalities of interest notwithstanding). To quote from John Clay: While still in Chicago, Laing was invited by some doctors to examine a young girl diagnosed as schizophrenic. The girl was locked into a padded cell in a special hospital, and sat there naked. She usually spent the whole day rocking to and fro. The doctors asked Laing for his opinion. What would he do about her? Unexpectedly, Laing stripped off naked himself and entered her cell. There he sat with her, rocking in time to her rhythm. After about twenty minutes she started speaking, something she had not done for several months. The doctors were amazed. ‘Did it never occur to you to do that?’ Laing commented to them later, with feigned innocence. (1997: 171–2)12

Laing was, of course, an irrepressible showman, but this episode is also of major conceptual import. The milieu in which this novel transversality between Laing and the severely catatonic patient was created consists of very disparate entities which had to be assembled together according to a multivalent logic or logics – bodies (both naked and clothed; indeed, one can assume that the catatonic young girl’s doctors at the hospital were wearing the officially prescribed white coats), bodily movements (rocking in this case), hospital rooms (such as the padded cell) and buildings, voices and everyday speech, facial expressions, the discourses of psychiatry, medical routines and practices, and so on. At La Borde, Guattari and his associates would have been constructing transversalities and their accompanying assemblages on a similarly large scale, albeit without the emblematic official white coats and the discourses of a mainstream psychiatric practice.13 When it came to providing cartographies (a task Guattari called ‘metamodelization’) of these complex formations which he called ‘ecosophic objects’, Guattari’s preference was for a non-mathematical and non-representational logic based on the quadrant rather than the binary or triad.14 The ecosophic object is constituted on the basis of four functors (‘functor/foncteur’ being a term in mathematics designating the mapping between categories): (1) material, energetic and semiotic fluxes;

Deleuze, Guattari and Partial Objects  23 (2) concrete and abstract machinic phyla; (3) virtual universes of value; (4) finite existential territories (1995: 124/172). Janell Watson provides the following grid of Guattari’s four functors or functives:15

Watson’s grid allows us to see how Guattari’s ecosophic objects are organised into a super-assemblage consisting of discursivities, references, causalities and processes, all connected with each other. Guattari also makes it clear that by resorting to the notion of a functor or functives he is seeking an alternative to the paradigms or conceptual templates espoused by Freudians, Saussureans and Marxists: To speak of machines rather than drives, fluxes rather than libido, exis-

tentialusTerritories rather than the instances of organised the self and >Watson’s grid allows to see how Guattari’s ecosophic objects are intoof transference,

incorporeal Universes rather than unconscious complexes and sublimation, chaosmic entities rather than signifiers – fitting ontological dimensions 1

24  Kenneth Surin together in a circular manner rather than dividing the world up into infrastructure and superstructure – may not simply be a matter of vocabulary! (1995: 126/175)

Guattari was therefore in search of a complex and multifaceted ontology not forthcoming from the followers of Freud, Saussure and Marx. Of these four functors, fluxes or flows are perhaps most familiar to the readers of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Fluxes or flows, redolent with all the broadly angled connotations of fluidity or liquidity, were chosen by Deleuze and Guattari as a direct counter to the ostensible rigidities of an explicit or implicit structuralism. Flows can, of course, encompass a wide and incongruous-seeming range of phenomena. In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus flows and fluxes incorporate matter, energy, words and their myriad and sometimes almost impossible to attain meanings (Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was a particular favourite of Guattari’s), desire, libido, commodities, weapons, metals, capital; and they have conceptual affiliations with nomads, deterritorialisations, machines and smooth space.16 In the context of our discussion, R. D. Laing’s decisive creation of a transversality (as opposed to a transference) in the case of the catatonic patient would amount to the unclogging of an energetic flow of speech that had been blocked as a result of her catatonic condition. Guattari’s second functor – concrete and machinic phyla – derives from the insight that evolutionary mutation not only operates in the realm of organic matter, but also encompasses machinic implements and technologies. There are animal phyla, but also machinic phyla: ‘We may speak of a machinic phylum, or technological lineage, wherever we find a constellation of singularities, prolongable by certain operations, which converge, and make the operations converge, upon one or several assignable traits of expression’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 406). Or again in A Thousand Plateaus, where these phyla are said to be ‘matter in movement’: We always get back to this definition: the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. . . . Unformed matter, the phylum, is not dead, brute, homogeneous matter, but a matter-movement bearing singularities or haecceities, qualities, and even operations (itinerant technological lineages). (1987: 409, 512/509, 638; italics in original)

As a functor, the machinic phyla share the property of discursivity with their correlative functor, the energetic flows. Our subjectivities are plugged into the machinic phyla and vice versa, so that they function as

Deleuze, Guattari and Partial Objects  25 our technological prostheses. Hence, in the context of our discussion, an electro-shock machine, as it alters the subjective dispositions of a patient, would be a component in the machinic phylum into which the La Borde clinic is inserted. The third functor – virtual incorporeal universes of value – designates the shared aspects of subjectivity that come to exist only when they are embodied in the fourth functor, the existential territories: in a certain fashion, all modelling systems are valid, all are acceptable, in my opinion. This is solely to the extent that their principles of intelligibility give up any universalist pretention [sic] and admit that they have no other mission than to contribute to the cartography of existential Territories, implying sensible, cognitive, affective, aesthetic, etc. Universes, for clearly delimited areas and periods of time. (Guattari 2013: 3/12)

As the name implies, virtual incorporeal universes are crystallisations of values or symbolic and cultural references characteristic of a particular epoch or social assemblage. Hence the therapeutic values espoused at La Borde are those specific to mid to late twentieth-century Western Europe and North America – at an earlier time a schizophrenic would have been ministered to by a priest or monk, or in a non-Western milieu, even today, by a shaman or medicine man or woman. The fourth functor – the existential territories – within which the universes of value are embodied refers to the lived experience of the body, self, family, a ‘native’ tongue, race and ethnicity, and so forth: ‘The objects of art and desire are apprehended within existential territories which are at the same time the body proper, the self, the maternal body, lived space, refrains of the mother tongue, familiar faces, family lore, ethnicity’ (Guattari 1995: 95/132). Or as Guattari says elsewhere about our lives as individuated beings: We must start from a multivalent logic, and accept the notion of identity which I call existential territory, because we cannot live outside our bodies, our friends, some sort of human cluster, and at the same time, we are bursting out of this situation. (1996: 216)

This, then, is the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari (or at any rate, it is one way of framing it, there of course being alternative framings for this ontology). Our lives, whether as individuals or as social beings (the two of course being inextricably bound together), are therefore inserted in a vast and complex web whose ecosophic cartography is rendered by the application of these four functors or functives. In this gigantic web, groups surround countless bodies; groups are surrounded by their milieu, the myriad milieux surrounded by their universes.

26  Kenneth Surin No one component in this web is isolated from the other; everything surrounds, and is surrounded by, everything else. All things coexist and interact in an immense, pullulating chaosmos, a chaosmos marked by an irreducible heterogenesis in which a potentially infinite number of singularities (with their associated subjectivities) are created out of energydesire, die out when voided of energy-desire, become merged with other singularities when energy-desire takes a different course, and so on. The significance and utility of a theory of childhood development using this Deleuze-Guattarian conceptualisation of partial objects is that it allows us to bypass the straitjacket of its orthodox Freudian counterpart, predicated as it is on the pre-eminence of the individual psyche and a five-stage psychosexual aetiology (oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital). The alternative conceptualisation associated with Deleuze and Guattari views the child and its body as an assemblage. To be more precise, the child is an assemblage of assemblages: some sexual and psychic, but others decisively not so, such as the political, geographic, biological, mediatic and communicative. Deleuze and Guattari’s child is an assemblage of assemblages that promise a much wider conceptual field than Freud’s theorem.

Notes   1. Wherever possible page references will be given first to the English translation, and then to the original after a slash (e.g. 51/65).   2. Freud used the term ‘polymorphous perversity’ to characterise the child’s sexual nature in the first few years of the child’s life, when the child possesses the ability to derive sexual satisfaction in ways not constrained by social norms.   3. For Winnicott on transference and counter-transference, see his 1949 and 1960.   4. To quote Lacan: ‘often with that upon which the drive closes – this object, which is in fact simply the presence of a hollow, a void, which can be, Freud tells us, by any object, and whose agency we know only in the form of the lost object, the petit a’ (1981: 180/164).   5. The tense personal relationship between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari, especially after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, is described at length in Dosse 2010.  6. For Klein’s ‘theater of terror’, see Deleuze 1990: 186/218. On the production of concepts as a form of dramatisation, see Deleuze, ‘The Method of Dramatization’, in Deleuze 2004: 94–116/131–62.   7. The case history of ‘B’ in the last chapter of Klein’s The Psychoanalysis of Children is sobering. ‘B’s severe mental crises made him barely functional when he started his sessions with Klein, but after 380 hours of what must have been gruelling sessions, she reports that he restored his everyday functioning by ‘regaining’ a heterosexual orientation after being homosexual for most of his life. The possibility that he might have been helped to go through life as a homosexual with a functional everyday life never seemed to cross Klein’s mind.   Deleuze deals directly with the question of Klein’s inability to break with the psychoanalytic paradigm in his 1973 essay ‘Nomadic Thought’: ‘In what

Deleuze, Guattari and Partial Objects  27 respect does a psychoanalyst as original as Melanie Klein still remain within the psychoanalytic system? She explains it herself quite well: the partial objects she tells us about, with their explosions, their flows, etc., are only fantasy. The patients bring lived experiences, intensely lived experiences, to Melanie Klein and she translates them into fantasy. There you have a contract, specifically a contract: give me your lived experiences, and I will give you fantasies. And the contract implies an exchange, an exchange of money and words’ (Deleuze 2004: 254).   8. Greenberg and Mitchell point out that Winnicott remained neutral in the bitter professional rivalry between Klein and Freud’s daughter Anna (1983: 144).   9. Winnicott presents this schema in his ‘Primitive Emotional Development’; see Winnicott 1958: 145–56). 10. Guattari refers here to Winnicott’s 1953 paper ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’; see Winnicott 1994: 5. 11. In the following paragraphs I present a version of the argument developed in a previous article (Surin 2016). 12. Dosse is informative on the disagreements between Guattari and Laing. 13. Not surprisingly, two issues were recurrent points of contention and negotiation for those who ran La Borde: how deregulated it was to be, institutionally, for those severely impaired when it came to the merest modicum of everyday functioning, and the role of medication in the treatment of patients who were often unresponsive to conventional therapies and medical regimens. Dosse provides a wealth of detail on this, and shows that Guattari was generally in favour of both regulation (e.g. he would insist that patients get out of bed and adhere to a daily timetable) and the use of medication (which was frowned upon by the antipsychiatrists on the grounds that establishment psychiatrists basically medicated their patients not to help them, but to smooth over their own inadequacies as medical practitioners – hence Guattari’s disagreement with antipsychiatrists such as Laing who were antipathetic to medicating patients). A form of social or group psychotherapy was the institutional norm at La Borde, but within this broad ambit ‘orthodox’ psychiatric interventions (such as electro-shock therapy, often requested by those patients dealing with debilitating anxieties which could not be calmed down by any other means) were permitted. Dosse indicates that Guattari was fairly comfortable with the terms of this set-up. (Incidentally, Dosse also says that Deleuze was uncomfortable being around those who were mentally broken-down, and avoided La Borde for this reason.) 14. To quote Guattari on his preference for the quadrant when it comes to metamodelling: ‘the categories of metamodelization proposed here . . . are . . . of interest because they come in fours and allow us to break free of tertiary descriptions which always end up falling back into dualisms’ (1995: 31/51). 15. Watson 2009: 100. 16. See Watson 2013: 126.

References Clay, J. (1997), R. D. Laing: A Divided Self: A Biography, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Deleuze, G. (1986), Foucault, trans. S. Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published as Foucault, Paris: Minuit, 1985. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, ed. C. V. Boundas, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press. Originally published as Logique du sens, Paris: Minuit, 1969.

28  Kenneth Surin Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.  W. Smith and M.  A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published as Critique et clinique, Paris: Minuit, 1993. Deleuze, G. (2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. M. Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e). Originally published as L’Île déserte et autres textes: textes et entretiens 1953–1974, Paris: Minuit, 2002. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published as Capitalisme et schizophrénie, L’anti-Œdipe, Paris: Minuit, 1972. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published as Mille plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénie, Paris: Minuit, 1980. Dosse, F. (2010), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. D. Glassman, New York: Columbia University Press. Originally published as Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie croisée, Paris: La Découverte, 2007. Greenberg, J. R. and S. A. Mitchell (1983), Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guattari, F. (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Originally published as Chaosmose, Paris: Galilée, 1992. Guattari, F. (1996), The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko, Oxford: Blackwell. Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton, London: Athlone Press. Originally published as Les trois écologies, Paris: Galilée, 1989. Guattari, F. (2013), Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. A. Goffey, London: Bloomsbury. Originally published as Cartographies schizoanalytiques, Paris: Galilée, 1989. Guattari, F. (2015), Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955– 1971, trans. A. Hodges, intro. G. Deleuze, New York: Semiotext(e). Originally published as Psychanalyse et transversalité, Paris: François Maspero, 1972; republished by La Découverte, 2003. Klein, M. (1960), The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. A. Strachey, New York: Grove Press. Originally published in 1932. Lacan, J. (1981), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: W. W. Norton. Originally published as Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XI, ‘Les quatre concepts fundamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1973. Surin, K. (2016), ‘Surroundings: Deleuze and Guattari’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 41: 403–10. Watson, J. (2009), Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing between Lacan and Deleuze, London: Continuum. Watson, J. (2013), ‘Flow’, in E.  B. Young with G. Genosko and J. Watson, The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary, London: Bloomsbury. Winnicott, D. W. (1949), ‘Hate in the Counter-Transference’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30: 69–74. Winnicott, D. W. (1958), Through Paediatrics to Psycho-analysis: Collected Papers, London: Tavistock Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1960), ‘Counter-Transference’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 33: 17–21. Winnicott, D. W. (1994), Playing and Reality, London: Routledge.

Chapter 2

Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality

Anna Hickey-Moody

This chapter is a critical examination of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on Little Hans, the young boy at the centre of Freud’s case study of the ‘Oedipus complex’. There is no doubt that the concepts developed by Freud remain useful for clinical psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice. The discussion contained within this chapter is a scholarly and conceptual critique, not a clinical critique. I am interested in the theoretical work Deleuze and Guattari undertake both implicitly and explicitly through their representation of Hans. In what is to follow, I demonstrate the allegiances between Deleuze, Guattari and Freud that are performed through their work on Little Hans. In so doing, I also argue that Freud’s work on Hans is very much an artefact of the time in which it was produced, a Victorian model for sexual organisation that is characteristic of the social forms of repression that were embedded in culture. In developing this argument, I engage with Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality, and discuss resonances between Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari’s project, while arguing that Deleuze’s work on Hans illustrates the problems identified by Foucault’s critical thought on sexuality rather than further performing Deleuze’s critique of the politics of the family and psychoanalysis.

Who Is Little Hans and Why Does He Matter? Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, while open to considerable criticism because of its heterosexually exclusive account of child sexual development, can be regarded as definitive of popular cultural understandings of the way gender and sexual identity develops in boys. The theory of the Oedipus complex itself, as Freud named it, was central to his work. Freud was attracted to Greek myths because he believed they gave access to the unconscious, and that they embodied central

30  Anna Hickey-Moody truths about the nature of the human psyche (Buxton 2004: 237). However, Freud’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex has been questioned by scholars for numerous reasons. These include that fact that Oedipus could not have been suffering any form of ‘jealous’ rage when he killed his father because, at the time of the murder, Oedipus did not know the identity of his biological father. To be clear, Oedipus did not know that the man he killed was his father. More importantly, it seems that taking the murder out of its broader context also means taking the sense-making meaning out of the story. To explain: in the myth, the story begins with Laios, Oedipus’ father, who falls in love with a handsome boy-child called Chrysippos. Laios abducts young Chrysippos to Thebes, for sexual purposes. Chrysippos subsequently kills himself from shame and Chrysippos’ enraged father puts a curse on Laios. This curse is quickly forgotten when Oedipus is held up as a lone actor in the tragedy of his own life. Buxton explains Laios’ actions and the subsequent curse: ‘This was represented by the Greeks as the first act of pederastic abduction and its catastrophic mythological consequences suggest that, for all the toleration of pederasty in classical Greek culture, the practice could easily run into powerful social disapproval’ (2004: 162). We can already see that social values, paedophilia and abuse lie at the heart of the tragic events chronicled in the Oedipus myth, not a boy-child’s love for his mother and jealousy of his father, which Freud suggests lies at the heart of the tragedy. In this respect, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari (1983) absolutely pinpoint the main problem with the Oedipus complex, namely, that its focus is too narrow, and it leads to attributing blame within a family unit in ways that neglect broader social dynamics, causes and histories. As the myth of Oedipus unfolds, an oracle then tells cursed Laios and his wife Jocasta not to have a child because if they do, the child will kill his father (Laios). Subsequently, when their son Oedipus is born, the couple pin his ankles together and give him to a herdsman, instructing him to let the infant die on Mt Kithairon. However, the herdsman takes pity on the child and gives him to a childless couple (Polybos and Merope). When Oedipus comes to adulthood he is told by an oracle that he will kill his father and lie with his mother. Appalled, he flees his residence in Corinth and refuses ever to return in the hope that he can escape this dire prediction. He did not know that his father was not Polybus, nor his mother Merope. So the oracle’s story plays out; while travelling on the road, Oedipus quarrels with an old man and kills him. The old man, unknown to him, is his biological father Laios. He then takes up a challenge to answer a riddle and

Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality  31 does so correctly. The prize is marriage to the woman recently bereaved by the death of Laios: his biological mother Jocasta. They bear four children. It is not until pestilence and plague come to the kingdom that Oedipus suspects something intrinsically wrong. When he seeks answers from the oracle he is told to uncover the murderer of the old king Laios. He does so, and the truth of the situation is revealed to him; only at this point does he uncover the truth of his parentage, his adoption and the identity of the old man he killed on the road. Oedipus blinds himself in his grief and guilt and Jocasta kills herself (see Buxton 2004). On reflection, then, rather than the tragedy springing from the boy-child’s desire to bed his mother and dispatch his father, it seems that the curse of the abused child Chrysippos’ father has come to pass. In many ways the myth is actually a cautionary tale against pederasty, and the trials of Oedipus relate more to the act of paedophilia that caused them than to Oedipus himself. Perhaps strangely, then, Freud sees this myth as predominantly embodying the truth of childhood sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. For Freud, the ‘social ills’ brought to light by the myth are childhood sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex, the guilt that engenders, and the fear of retribution by the parent of the same sex. In fathers and sons this materialises as a son’s fear of castration by the father. If unresolved, Freud suggests this process can lead to neurosis in later life. However, as I suggest above, it can be argued that Freud has taken the nuclear family out of the context of previous child sexual abuse and abduction, both of which are the start of the problem, or beginning of the curse. The curse of the abused child (Chrysippos’ father) was inherited by Oedipus and this curse is what Freud is writing about. Freud suggests: The physician who treats an adult suffering from neurosis by means of psychoanalysis – by painstakingly uncovering psychic formations layer by layer – eventually arrives at certain assumptions about infantile sexuality, in whose components he believes he has found the driving force behind all neurotic symptoms later in life. (2002: 3)

This hypothesis – while often having clinical utility – is largely supported in Freud’s work by the ‘evidence’ of a single ‘case study’, that of ‘Little Hans’ (or, also, ‘Little Herbert’).1 Freud’s basic premise was that all neurotic behaviours in adulthood stemmed from repressed sexual feelings in childhood, keeping in mind that here, ‘sexual’ should be interpreted in the broadest possible way, to include sensual pleasure from sucking (on mother’s breast) and sensation in the anus, as well as non-sexual

32  Anna Hickey-Moody t­ouching of parts of the body, thumb-sucking and so on (Freud 1965: 74). A dominant aspect of these unconscious desires is supposedly a child’s longing for their parent of the opposite sex. In a little boy, this longing for his mother is transformed, through fear of his father’s revenge, into a fear of being castrated by his father. Furthermore, this process of the boy-child having desire for his mother and unconsciously fearing his father’s revenge through castration also leads to the phenomenon of ‘identification with the aggressor’, or the boy’s active efforts to master his anxiety by taking on his father’s qualities and becoming like his father in order to prevent such retribution. It is therefore seen by Freud as a process that is central to the becoming of his ‘maleness’. Brown reinscribes the fantasies of gender that psychoanalytic theory embeds through explaining that [i]dentification with the aggressor is a method of mastering anxiety by assuming the opponent’s qualities through a process of introjection. Thus, the little boy who has undergone dental treatment will play at being a dentist with his sister as a patient. (1961: 70)

This process of mother-desire, father-fear and father-identification (to oversimplify it) is seen as the key in boys becoming like their fathers. Further, this is seen as being essential to the development of their gender identity. By understanding these issues in the developing child, and by the provision of an unrepressed and open environment where sexual anxieties can be expressed, Freud suggests that neurosis in later life can be avoided. Accepted and recognised for what it is while it is occurring, he hypothesises, childhood sexual neurosis can be worked through, leading to ‘normal’ sexual development in later life. In the Little Hans case, Hans developed an intense fear of horses at the age of five which caused him to be afraid of leaving the house. Freud interpreted this fear as a projection on to the horse of Hans’s fear of his father visiting retribution upon him for his longing to have his mother (Stafford-Clark 1965: 142). The fear could also have been a response to the many large animals on the streets of Vienna (at that time Viennese streets were full of horses which were used as a popular form of transport). In considering Freud’s legacy through his theory of infantile sexuality and the ramifications of this theory over the following decades, we must be mindful of the conservative and often mechanistic nature of both medicine and the cultural environment of the time. In what follows, I will look at the implications of Freud’s thought in a more contemporary context; however, I note that while the theory is clearly flawed, that

Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality  33 has not detracted from its take-up and impact and the effect it has had on thinking in psychiatric medicine and indeed social philosophy. The importance of childhood experience and possible psychological damage caused by powerful, unresolved fears in childhood has remained a truth in contemporary understandings of analysis, although the details of the Little Hans case study have not survived as relevant. Jerome Wakefield, Professor of Social Work and Psychiatry at New York University, suggests (14 December 2008) that John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s theory of infant attachment and maternal deprivation illuminates the recorded interactions in the Little Hans study and points towards some quite different interpretations then those Freud made at the time. John Bowlby was a child psychiatrist and analyst, practising from the 1940s to the 1970s. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1928 with a degree in psychology and pre-clinical sciences; later he completed a medical degree and finished his training as a psychoanalyst in 1936. He went on to research the nature of the relationship between mothers and infants from the earliest age. His findings, which were grounded in longitudinal studies of bonding behaviours in animals, led him to a study in 1948 of the hospitalisation of children and disruption of the mother/infant bond (Bretherton 1992: 761). Based on his research, Bowlby came to the understanding that a child’s tie to its mother is not based on sensuous oral gratification, which was the Freudian premise (Brown 1961: 21), but the evolutionary function of protecting the child from danger and preserving its life (Bretherton 1992: 766). It is to this end, that the complex behavioural system of infants (sucking, crying, eye contact, etc.) and the mother’s responses to these, closely tie the mother and infant together with varying degrees of security depending on the consistency of the maternal response. From this perspective, a child’s attachment behaviours go hand in hand with the parental response, those infants experiencing the most responsive maternal attention being the most securely attached and those experiencing the most unpredictable maternal response being the most anxiously attached. This perspective also demands that events in the family as a whole are taken into account, not the libidinal longings of the infant alone. Bowlby ‘came to believe that actual family experiences were much more important, if not the basic cause of emotional disturbance’ (Bretherton 1992: 760). Bowlby is now regarded by many as the father of family therapy, as he saw the parents, their own behaviour and their own childhood experiences as essential in the treatment of a child’s distress.

34  Anna Hickey-Moody Bowlby’s work was expanded and consolidated by Mary Ainsworth, who worked with him at the Tavistock Clinic in London in the early 1950s (Bretherton 1992: 759). In 1954, Ainsworth went to Uganda and with a small research grant, and completed one of the first studies of infant development of the twentieth century (Mooney 2010: 27). Building on this, in 1967 Ainsworth developed a list of behaviours which indicated attachment between mothers and their babies; this included crying when the mother leaves, showing concern for her whereabouts, ‘flying to the mother when frightened’, and ‘using the mother as a safe haven when in a strange situation’ (Mooney 2010: 28). She saw these behaviours as natural products of the attachment between infant and mother that have developed primarily as a survival mechanism. What’s more, she identified that babies who were securely attached to their parents explored the world with more confidence than those who were insecurely attached. These babies cried more and explored with less confidence (Bretherton 1992: 764). The forms of attachment that occur between mothers and infants were categorised and studied by Ainsworth in controlled circumstances. She went on to develop the ‘Strange Situation Test’ where the infant reaction to being reunited with her mother after a slightly stressful short separation could be measured by consistent behaviours exhibited by infants, no matter what their cultural background. Furthermore, the patterns that are established in infancy are seen to carry over to later childhood and adulthood, as attachment behaviours are an internalised working model that are, in some part, transferred to our adult relationships: An ‘attachment’ is an affectional bond, and hence an attachment figure is never wholly interchangeable with or replaceable by another, even though there may be others to whom one is also attached. In attachments, as in other affectional bonds, there is a need to maintain proximity, distress upon inexplicable separation, pleasure or joy upon reunion, and grief at loss. (Ainsworth 1989: 711)

In the light of these well-researched theories of Bowlby, Ainsworth and now many others – e.g. Brazelton (1983), Klaus and Kennell (1976) – I now examine the Little Hans case study as it was recorded by Freud himself. Let us first return to the comments of Jerome Wakefield, following access to original interviews from the Freud Archive in New York. They point out many aspects of the case study that are crucial to the outcomes, but which are overlooked in the study itself. Firstly, the case study of Hans was recorded by Hans’s father, Max Graf, who was not a qualified psychoanalyst but a musicologist who reported his ‘find-

Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality  35 ings’ to Freud second hand. Reading the case study itself, I am struck by how often Max makes sexual interpretations of his son’s comments, particularly about horses. As such, it is hardly surprising that this way of gaining positive attention from his father becomes something of a habit for the boy. Remembering that it is a phobia of horses that initiates the father performing an ‘analysis’, Max and Freud fail to mention until much later that Hans actually witnessed a very frightening scene of a horse, pulling a crowded vehicle, falling over and dying in the street. It seems that this trauma may also be a precipitating factor for Hans’s anxiety, perhaps more so than his supposed fear of being castrated by his father. Herbert’s (‘Little Hans’) mother was Freud’s patient in the first instance, and his father was part of Freud’s ‘Wednesday group’, a meeting of people interested in psychoanalysis. The pair were encouraged to marry by Freud. It was not a happy marriage, however, and there were intense conflicts inside the family. Max reported that his wife Olga had aggressive outbursts and bouts of depression following sexual relations. She suffered from agoraphobia and ‘rejected’ their daughter (Hans’s little sister) after she was born. Perhaps surprisingly, the function of sexual abuse as a precipitating factor in adult neurosis is notoriously absent in Freud’s assessments. It seems possible that Olga herself was an abuse survivor although Freud does not suggest this as a possibility. I will now reconsider some of the recorded interactions between Hans and his parents in the light of Bowlby and attachment theory. It is striking, in a contemporary context, the degree to which the parents, who thought they were being ‘open’ about sexual matters, actually offer confusing information to Hans when he asks normal questions on the subject. Hans refers to his penis as his ‘widdler’ and while that seems a perfectly natural word for a child to use, his parents never illuminate the difference between sexual/reproductive function and elimination: Thus he once asked his mother: Hans: ‘Mummy have you got a widdler too?’ Mummy: ‘Of course I have. Why?’ Hans: ‘I just wondered.’ At the same age he once went into a cowshed and saw a cow being milked. ‘Look, milk comes out of the cow’s widdler.’ (Freud 2002: 4)

It is surprising that the mother asserts she has a penis, and sees no reason to differentiate between the penis, the vagina and the breast/udder.

36  Anna Hickey-Moody Later, in Freud’s recorded interactions between Hans and his mother, Olga asks Hans: ‘Whatever are you looking at?’ Hans: ‘I’m just looking to see if you’ve got a widdler too.’ Mummy: ‘Of course I have. Didn’t you know that?’ At the age of three and a half his mother catches him with his hand on his penis. She threatens him: ‘If you do that I’ll tell Dr A. to come and he’ll cut off your widdler. What will you do when you need to widdle?’ Hans: ‘I’ll use my botty.’ (Freud 2002: 5)

Here it seems that it is Hans’s mother, rather than his father, who is directly threatening him with castration and we can consider the implications of this in the light of Ainsworth’s findings on attachment. As his object of principal attachment, Hans will be most sensitive to his mother and her emotional state, which is mercurial. She is agoraphobic and fears leaving the house, although we hear nothing about the possible causes for her depression and anxiety. We do know that Olga was a violinist and it is possible that she found the restrictions of being an early twentieth-century housewife and mother profoundly depressing. We could speculate that Hans has an anxious attachment to his mother and that this intensifies when he senses that she herself is unstable or unhappy, hence his own fear at leaving the house, not just leaving the house but leaving his mother. The anxiety Hans experiences when he leaves his mother is specifically discussed by Freud, who states: On the 7th January he sets off as usual with his nursery maid to the Stadpark, bursts into tears in the street and asks to be taken home, because he wants to ‘nuzzle’ with his mummy. When asked at home why he did not want to go any further and why he was crying he will not reply. He is as cheerful as ever until the evening; at bedtime he becomes visibly anxious, cries, and cannot be persuaded to leave his mother; again he wants to nuzzle. (2002: 18)

As his mother is Hans’s primary object of attachment and safety, Olga’s anxiety signifies something very wrong to Hans. His childish interpretation of Olga’s fear of leaving the house may quite rightly be that scary things happen on the street: things like horses falling down thrashing, while pulling carriages full of people. We will never know for certain the aetiology of Hans’s fear. Therefore, a considered analysis must remain mindful of the fact that Hans was part of a family system and his anxieties and actions are a response to the family system of individuals and relationships, of which there is very scant record. I cannot help but wonder if, in the same way that Freud ignored Laios’

Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality  37 abduction of young Chrysippos and the social shame surrounding his abuse and suicide, Freud also ignores Olga’s psychological issues and Hans’s response to his mother’s psychiatric condition and his parents’ troubled relationship. Despite the many problems with Freud’s construction of the Oedipus complex, his story of Little Hans has become key to some ways of thinking about masculinity. For example, Ken Corbett situates Hans as the archetypal figure of masculinity he indeed has become and, in so doing, frames the role that Hans has played in grafting Oedipus from myth to person (2009: 19). Specifically, Corbett explains that [i]t is a theory that continues to stand as the canonical psychological narrative of masculinity: we have known a boy to be a boy through his phallic preoccupations and castration fears, enacted alongside and through his desire for his mother and his rivalry with his father, which in time resolve via the boy’s separation from his mother and his identification with his father. (2009: 19)

Corbett also notes that Freud’s construction of the events surrounding Hans’s fear of horses leaves out, or overlooks, his attachment to his mother, which all other accounts suggest might have been quite anxious and unpredictable. Corbett continues: ‘It is noteworthy that as Freud turns toward his analysis of repression, he presumes adequate or untroubled attachment to security: the object (the mother) in this case, according to Freud, was secure’ (2009: 23). This presumption of secure attachment in fact runs contra to what may be inferred from Olga’s tumultuous emotional state as evidenced by her fear of leaving the house, sexual anxiety and an unhappy marriage/angry relationship with his father. It seems difficult to see how a secure attachment could have formed under such conditions. Despite (or perhaps because of, its largely speculative basis, the Little Hans study was the first famous scholarly consideration of sexuality in childhood. Indeed, Little Hans is as close to a general theory of child sexuality as Freud comes, which is why it formed a starting point for the investigations of the psychoanalytic research discussed above, and for the development of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, the Oedipal story about supposed repression of desire for the parent of the opposite sex came to be not only dominant, but a story about ‘normal’ sexual development in children. In what is to follow, I will argue that Freud’s original case study, while offering a starting point for the public discussion of the sexuality of children, which ostensibly created public space for thinking and speaking about child sex, clearly contains defining features of what

38  Anna Hickey-Moody Foucault has critiqued as the medicalised and administered sexuality that is part of the governance of sexuality in post-Victorian times. Freud’s account of the case study of Hans and its supposed links to the myth of Oedipus appears in The Interpretation of Dreams, but it is the Little Hans case study which dramatises it as a conflict central to the development of both identity and sexuality. In Freud’s Little Hans, we find what Foucault calls the ‘incitement to discourse’ (1978: 17–35), defining sexuality as the named-as-hidden core of the modern subject and exemplified in the relations between Hans and his analysts. Hans is the most extended account of the child subject in Freud, melding the speakably sexual child subject with a model for heterosexual psychological development.

Foucault and ‘The Repressive Hypothesis’ Foucault questions the apparent simplicity of the hypothesis of sexual repression, held to have developed after the seventeenth century and taking firm hold in the society of Victorian times, where sex was confined silently to the marital bed: ‘Not only did it not exist, it had no right to exist and would be made to disappear upon its least ­manifestation’ (Foucault 1978: 4). This hypothesis of repression underpinned Freud’s theories of sexuality on which his reputation was largely built. However, if we are to attend to Foucault’s argument we have to consider that Freud, like other psychiatrists, doctors and medical practitioners, was as much part of the problem as he was its solution, continuing the mechanisms of repression as much as liberating us from them. Foucault uses as an example the ‘repression’ of sexuality by the Catholic Church from the seventeenth century onwards. While the Church increasingly imposed restrictions upon the performance of sexuality, at the same time it exhorted members to more and more detailed accounts of their sexual acts in the confessional and demanded a report of the smallest of sexual thoughts to be described, even those barely formulated (Foucault 1978: 20). It was in mediating every fleeting sexual thought of the congregation that the Church became increasingly powerful in Europe and transformed their every desire into discourse. Sex, says Foucault, ‘was not something one simply judged; it was something one administered. It was in the nature of public potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses’ (1978: 24). Over the course of the century, minor sexual aberrations were articulated and enumerated and placed in the hands of the legal system. The sexual life of children (which Foucault suggests seems to have mingled with that of adults in

Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality  39 a relatively free manner prior to the seventeenth century) became the subject of a largely silent discourse, articulated by school rules, the layout of educational institutions, the planning of their recreation and all aspects of their lives in which their sexuality was assumed to be alive and well and in need of surveillance and control: ‘The sex of the schoolboy became in the course of the eighteenth century – and quite apart from that of adolescents in general – a public problem’ (1978: 28). The sex life of children and adolescents became a silent event discussed only in forums of power – the education system, the medical system, the justice system. Foucault tells the story of a simple-minded adolescent farm hand, who in playing a common game with a local girl came to the attention of the authorities and was, in consequence, institutionalised for the rest of his life: The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality . . . could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. (1978: 31)

He suggests it is possible that in tightly managing the sexuality of the population in these ways, a working population could be conceived in the marital bed but any extra energy, needed for production, channelled and conserved (1978: 37). Over the course of the eighteenth century sex was increasingly discussed in the highly controlled forums of the churches, the courts, the education system and the medical system, and by the nineteenth century this included the couches of therapists. It seems that sexuality had not so much been repressed but transformed into a variety of discourses: ‘What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret’ (1978: 35). This discursive expansion, Foucault contends, led to two major modifications in the way that society managed sex. Firstly, the heterosexual and monogamous marriage became something of a still pool at the centre of the centrifugal whirlpool, relatively unexamined and undiscussed – the acceptable standard. The outer edges however, the aberrations or other-than-heterosexual marriage, was not acceptable. The sexuality of children, homosexuals, criminals and the mentally ill came under increasing scrutiny throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Educators and parents became fixated on extinguishing children’s masturbation. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a case study, rather than a person, and no aspect of his personhood was untouched by his sexuality. A whole medical system was set

40  Anna Hickey-Moody up to examine and record unproductive sexualities, to listen, discuss and record them in what Foucault calls ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’ (1978: 45). The very listening was a source of excitement, the recording and classifying and controlling a source of power; a whole system of spirals of pleasure for those supposedly curing or controlling or eradicating sexual behaviours that were anything other than the performance of the reproductive act. Foucault concludes that the hypothesis of the modern ‘repressive’ sexual society is a mistake, a red herring even; the truth, he says, is quite the reverse. Non-reproductive sex has never commanded so much attention and provided stimulation to so many: never have there existed more centers of power; never more attention manifested and verbalized; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the intensities of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere. (Foucault 1978: 49)

Towards the beginning of The History of Sexuality 1, Foucault accounts for the way narratives about sexuality now depend on an image of Victorian childhood: Everyone knew, for example, that children had no sex, which is why they were forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one’s eyes and stopped one’s ears whenever they came to show evidence to the contrary, and why a general and studied silence was imposed [on the subject]. (1978: 4)

This image of the bourgeois Victorian child accompanies Foucault’s suggestion that, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there was a shift away from thinking and talking about sex as a form of pleasure. His context for this timeline is, of course, Western European, and a more broadly applicable account can be extrapolated on to modernity in general. This shift is contiguous in his account with new functions for sex as a regulatory social norm and thus as a political institution (Foucault 1978: 3). While Foucault’s text ties this into the broader emergence of a modern biopolitics, the opening chapter, ‘We Other Victorians’, explicitly prioritises this image and its wider imagined context, in which sex practices proliferated while, simultaneously, sex was normatively institutionalised as an intensely private function of heterosexual marriage for purposes of procreation. But if this image of ‘Victorian’ sex bears much symbolic weight, it is only one element of a longer history of modern sex in which ‘sex’ becomes a field no longer primarily concerned with the experience of pleasure, but with managing power relations on both personal and social levels.

Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality  41 In Foucault’s account, the nineteenth century witnesses a proliferation of discourses that instruct people on what sex means, on how to have (and think and be) sex(ed) in the correct way and, perhaps more saliently, the incorrect ways one might have sex. Foucault names this narrative about Victorian sexuality the repressive hypothesis, a phenomenon centred on Victorian ideas of sexual propriety and discretion (1978: 3–13). Central to this hypothesis is the idea that a new array of ‘sexual sciences’, mostly made famous by Freud, facilitated a groundbreaking intervention in this Victorian silence around sex: his work on childhood sexuality constitutes the moment at which a distinct sexual child subject is made knowable. In response to the rhetorical question ‘have we not liberated ourselves from those two long centuries in which the history of sexuality must be seen first of all as the chronicle of an increasing repression?’ (1978: 5), Foucault turns to Freud, stating: We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. (1978: 5)

Foucault suggests that this shift in thinking occurred in part to accommodate the demands of capitalism, which required a productive labour force that was committed primarily to the demands of their work (1978: 5), and also to new modes of government. It was thus tied to education, on the one hand, and to science on the other: discursive apparatuses that are evidently linked in the Little Hans text through the figure of his primary analyst, Hans’s father, who was also Freud’s student. Foucault’s particular interest in the history of sexuality is how sex is constructed and policed – both explicitly, as with the role of sexuality in training children at the new schools of this period, and implicitly, in new narratives about the self and desire. His historical perspective, moreover, in which Freud’s contributions are something of the past, which ‘we’ have learned did not go far enough, is also the context for Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis, if not also for Foucault’s spectacular influence today. The relevance of this story for unpacking Freud’s theories of sexuality incongruously extends to Deleuze’s work on children. Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, as a story about producing sexuality through repression, is inseparable from theories of heterosexual ­orientation. The organisation of power and pleasure in these models

42  Anna Hickey-Moody of subjectivity is also interrogated by some of Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to disrupt presumptions that the subject is, or should be, a unified social organism. For example, the concepts of becoming, line of flight, and desiring-machine or assemblage each characterise a non-individualised human being. Further, as the title of Anti-Oedipus suggests, the Oedipal narrative exemplifies the hierarchised, organised, individualised model of subjectivity with which their critique is concerned. These alternative conceptions of the social organism, and of desire, are not necessarily unified. Becoming-other (animal, girl, child, etc.) in part expresses the role that others play in shaping the ways we are in the world and the way the world and others force us to think. Others and contexts are folded into subjectivity, foregrounding the inescapably political and communal contexts in which individual subjects live. Clearly ‘others’ also pivotally shape the subject’s place in the Oedipal story, but the Oedipal trajectory is one in which desire is ordered around a central point and, at the same time, channelled to that point by means of repression. However, binding together the social organism and desire – understanding the social organism as a story about desire – is pivotal not only to the Oedipal story, and to Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, but also to Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud. As Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘line of flight’ can be read alongside Freud’s death drive, as well as alongside ‘becoming’, the critique of Oedipus central to Deleuze and Guattari bears the traces of some key psychoanalytic ideas about children and developmental sexuality. I want to follow some of these ideas back to Deleuze’s discussion of Oedipus in AntiOedipus and children in The Logic of Sense. I suggest that ‘becoming’ and associated concepts in Deleuze and Guattari may be best read as a deterritorialisation of Oedipus, rather than an entirely discrete model of subjectivity departing from other premises. Desiring-machine and assemblage, for example, are concepts designed to disrupt presumptions about a unified, hetero-sexed social organism. But their emergence from Deleuze’s readings of Freud’s earlier ideas about children, sex and meaning at times makes them a way of recasting Freud’s case studies. Little Hans’s story can be reconceived through narratives of production rather than repression; through relational relationships between physical spaces, material forms like geography, flora, fauna, architecture and people.2 They are also shaped by the contemporary transition from Freudian to Lacanian psychoanalysis (of which even Deleuze and Guattari’s work remained less critical). I want to turn briefly to the differences between concepts of childhood and subjectivity in The Logic of Sense and the ‘Capitalism and

Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality  43 Schizophrenia’ texts, and between Deleuze and Freud. If the case study of Little Hans provides a rich example of Foucault’s repressive hypothesis in action, it also provides a model for heterosexual subjectivity in The Logic of Sense. While in A Thousand Plateaus, in particular, Deleuze and Guattari’s references to Hans could be read as wanting to advance a politically liberal idea of childhood sexuality, their conception of the childhood that escapes the limitations of Oedipus remains linked to more conservative ideas of subjectivity first cohering in The Logic of Sense.

Conclusions Little Hans foregrounds a centrally vexing question for the repressive hypothesis: how do children come to know about sex? While Freud declares that he thinks Hans is neurotic and, thus, his case is not necessarily applicable to others (2002: 84), Hans’s story brings a range of psychoanalytic themes into view. It influenced Freud’s thinking for years and also the work of those who followed him. Freud understands Little Hans’s ingenuous expression of curiosity about the body (and not always a sexed or even a human body) as allowed by freedom from guilt and shame. Yet at the same time Little Hans tells the story of the emergence of just this guilt and shame, and indeed a phobia related directly back to his emerging awareness of ‘correct categories’ including ‘sex distinction’. Hans provided Freud with material to explain child sexual development and its possible perversion. In this process, he was constantly in dialogue with other psychologists over child sexuality, for which Little Hans was a key point of reference. Little Hans is thus not only a narrative in which ‘Oedipus’ is discovered, but a site for Freud’s negotiations over the importance of child sexuality to a model of the self in which ‘Oedipus’ names both a necessary developmental turning point and psycho-sexual a problem. The two key components of Little Hans for the Oedipal model are: (1) Hans’s development of a ‘castration complex’, and (2) the association of this complex with the mystery of his parents’ relationship. The discovery of genital pleasure is constituted as the root of sexuality and this sexuality manifests as a power dynamic via the castration threat, and thus is Oedipalised. For Freud, Hans is scared of the pleasure of his penis because he thinks his father will cut it off. And, again for Freud, Hans’s widdler is a potential threat to his father because he fantasises about using it to father children with his mother.

44  Anna Hickey-Moody For Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud, a misprision is imposed here: they refer to the analysts as ‘breaking [Little Hans’s] rhizome and blotching his map’ (1987: 15). Sexual desire is constituted as heterosexual and genital, overlaid on to Hans’s desire to have fun. The analyst/ father insists that Hans feels something particular for his mother, and insists on that particular feeling being reproductive and genital. At the same time, Hans, clearly with the encouragement of this analysis, is forever discovering widdlers everywhere – sometimes excitedly (lion), sometimes in terror (horse), and sometimes with a mixture of curiosity, fear and assurance (his mother, his sister). These many instances of ‘widdlers’ are reduced to meaning not just ‘the father’ but the Oedipal father, in competition for a sexual relationship with the mother. It is this interplay of exposure and repression that made Little Hans’s picture of the Oedipal crisis so pervasively influential. The child and adolescent case studies of this period give dramatic form to Freud’s foundational ideas. In closing, there are two dimensions to Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, both of which inform, for Deleuze, the psychosexual drama of the Oedipal boy that desires transgression. The first is a claim that sex is everywhere repressed, particularly associated with the institutions and discourses that shape the child-figures, like Hans and Alice, that inform A Thousand Plateaus and Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. While Deleuze and Guattari at times extol a liberatory narrative about child sexuality, they also clearly situate childhood sexuality as needing to be liberated from the imposition of the Oedipalised unconscious. The second is a model of sexuality in which both the unconscious and the sexual, or sexuality are simultaneously produced by a socially mandated repression of desire in the cathartic arrival of sexed subjectivity: the Oedipal narrative. My contention is that, while Deleuze and Guattari explicitly attack this model, it remains the foundation of the image of childhood explored in their work and is used to underpin both Oedipal capture and deterritorialising flight in A Thousand Plateaus. Little Hans becomes a name for the boy of the Oedipal crisis, endlessly reiterating the discovery of (hetero)sex as a play of the corporeal and fantastic. If the polymorphous perversity of children that is at times stressed by Freud is apparent in Hans’s queer curiosity, Freud’s texts are centred on its inevitable disappearance under the weight of heterosexual destiny. Paradoxically, it seems, the appeal of this perversity is the appeal of its disappearance. Deleuze’s child remains a romance of impossible rediscovery which equates the sex of children with madness, perversity and becoming as transgressive tools of a developmental

Little Hans and Pedagogies of Heterosexuality  45 s­ ubjectivity. There is no substantive place in Deleuze’s Hans for a child whose multiple sexual investments are always true possibilities and who is utterly disinvested in the Oedipalised subjectivity that Deleuze’s politics call on us to resist.

Notes 1. Following the publication of the ‘Kleiner Hans’ study in German it was also referred to as ‘Little John’ (the literal English translation) by Carl Jung, and he sometimes referred to it in this way during the Clark lectures. For some time (until 1924), Little Hans was also sometimes referred to as ‘Little Herbert’. 2. Deleuze and Guattari perform this reading themselves: ‘Once again, we turn to children. Note how they talk about animals, and are moved by them. They make a list of affects. Little Hans’s horse is not representative, but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft horseomnibus-street. It is defined by a list of active and passive affects in the context of the individuated assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker, pulling heavy loads, being whipped, falling, making a din with its legs, biting, etc. These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse “can do”. Hans is also taken up in the assemblage: his mother’s bed, the paternal element, the house, the café across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the fall, shame . . . these are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a question of imitating a horse, “playing” horse . . . The question is whether Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’s nor the horse’s, but that of the becoming horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 258).

References Ainsworth, M. S. (1989), ‘Attachments beyond Infancy’, American Psychologist, 44 (4): 709–16. Bowlby, J. (2008), A Secure Base, New York: Routledge. Bowlby, Sir R. (2004), Fifty Years of Attachment Theory, Donald Winnicott Memorial Lecture, London: Karnac. Brazelton, B. T. (1983), Infants and Mothers: Differences in Development, New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence. Bretherton, I. (1992), ‘The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’, Developmental Psychology, 28 (5): 759–75. Brown, J. A. C. (1961), Freud and the Post-Freudians, London: Penguin. Buxton, R. (2004), The Complete World of Greek Mythology, London: Thames & Hudson. Corbett, K. (2009), Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

46  Anna Hickey-Moody Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. H. Weaver, New York: Vintage Books. Freud, S. (1965), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, ed. J. Strachey, London: Avon. Freud, S. (2002), The Wolfman and Other Cases, London: Penguin. Klaus, M. H. and J. H. Kennell (1976), Parent-to-Infant Bonding, St. Louis: Mosby. Mind Changers (14 December 2008), Case Study: Little Hans, BBC Radio 4. Mooney, C. (2010), Theories of Attachment, St Paul, MN: Redleaf. Rycroft, C., G. Gorer, A. Storr, J. Wren-Lewis and P. Lomas (1966), Psychoanalysis Observed, London: Penguin. Stafford-Clark, D. (1965), What Freud Really Said, London: Penguin.

Chapter 3

Undoing the Parent-Function: The Metaphysics and Politics of a Deleuzian Child Ohad Zehavi

This chapter looks into the role played by children in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical thought. It charts some key occurrences of child figures in Deleuze’s oeuvre and coalesces them into a philosophical persona whose story unfolds against the backdrop of two main Deleuzian projects: metaphysics and political philosophy. The aim of the argument is twofold: to give an account of the ontological and political status of children as seen through a Deleuzian lens, and to elucidate some of Deleuze’s more vague philosophical notions using the important yet somewhat neglected figure of the child. The first part of this chapter portrays the child figure that Deleuze considers a veritable Spinozist, and attends to the ways this child comes to embody some of Deleuze’s key metaphysical concepts. In the second part the philosophical landscape changes dramatically to a political one, exposing a radically different facet in the Deleuzian child figure, who now appears as a mere Son or Daughter – a subjugated subject entangled in power relations that are governed by parental figures. The third and last part renders the notion of becoming-child a micropolitical tool at the disposal of an adult, who is called on to undo the parent-function and wrest the child metaphysician portrayed in the first part from the web of political constraints depicted in the second part.

The Spinozist Child: A Metaphysical Journey Philosophy had always been Deleuze’s primary interest – from his early commentaries on other philosophers such as Hume, Nietzsche, Kant and Spinoza, via his two patently philosophical tracts Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, to his later intellectual experimentations with Félix Guattari and his excursions into literature, art and cinema, all of which manifest a philosophical drive and a philosophical

48  Ohad Zehavi method. What lies at the heart of his philosophical endeavours is always metaphysics, that old philosophical inquiry into Being, Thought and their interrelations. That was his explicit project: ‘I feel I am a pure metaphysician,’ he said in 1981 (Deleuze 2007: 42).1 In fact, some see this enduring metaphysical quest as the very thing that singles Deleuze out from his contemporaries (Smith 2003: 50). Deleuze does not wish to transcend metaphysics, but works within the metaphysical tradition, trying to reorient it (Villani 2014). Nietzsche is clearly a major influence on Deleuze’s metaphysical thought, and in his important 1969 metaphysical tract The Logic of Sense he draws heavily on Stoic thought to formulate his unique metaphysics of sense and event (Williams 2008). But perhaps the most notable conceptual persona guiding Deleuze in this metaphysical journey is a child figure, the Little Girl,2 whom Deleuze seems to regard as Stoicism personified.3 The metaphysical quest seems to shift its orientation in the early 1970s, as Deleuze (following his encounter with Guattari) starts focusing on the body, rather than on language, and the metaphysician that seems to set the tone in this later phase is Spinoza.4 Here, too, emerges a constant child figure – more dispersed and scattered but no less consolidated and persistent – which comes to embody Deleuze’s Spinozist metaphysical project. Already in Deleuze and Guattari’s 1972 Anti-Oedipus, they proclaim that ‘the child is a metaphysical being’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 48), but the Spinozist metaphysical child is much more clearly manifested in their 1980 A Thousand Plateaus, and most saliently in the two subchapters in the tenth chapter on the notion of becoming, both titled ‘Memories of a Spinozist’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 253–60). Children play a key role in these two subchapters, in which Deleuze and Guattari boldly declare: ‘Children are Spinozists’ and ‘Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher’ (256). Three main concepts could probably represent (but definitely not exhaust) the influence of Spinoza’s metaphysics on Deleuze’s philosophy: body, affect and becoming.5 And all three are explicated, and to a great extent even developed, with the help of the child figure, and in particular one concrete figure, Sigmund Freud’s Little Hans, who not only plays a key role in the anti-Oedipal mission that Deleuze pursues with Guattari, but also embodies, for Deleuze, the Spinozist metaphysical practice, giving it its proper mise en scène. ‘Spinoza offers philosophers a new model: the body,’ says Deleuze in his 1970 philosophical commentary on the seventeenth-century philosopher (Deleuze 1988: 17). The body could be anything, he says: ‘an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus,

Undoing the Parent-Function  49 a social body, a collectivity’; and it is defined, following Spinoza, in terms of its longitude, which is the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles that compose it, and its latitude, which is the set of affects that occupy a body at each moment (127). Children, according to Deleuze, constantly explore the physical world in those terms, and Little Hans’s adventures are an exemplary case of this exploration. When Hans observes different ‘peepee-makers’, writes Deleuze, he does not refer to a sex organ, as Freud unavoidably and mistakenly infers, but to a material aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, and so on – a machinic part that can be found in girls as well, but also in horses, and in a cow’s udder, and even in a locomotive splashing water (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 256).6 This longitude of extensive qualities is complemented by the latitude of intensive qualities or affects. Deleuze constantly refers in this context to a single proposition from Spinoza: ‘we do not know what the body can do’ (Deleuze 1988: 17), he says, following Spinoza, and we know nothing about a body ‘until we know what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 257). This is the philosopher’s mission statement, and this is the mission that propels, unwittingly but in actual fact, children, who never cease to explore bodies and their affects; indeed, ‘once again, we turn to children’ (257).7 Children, Deleuze remarks, know very well how to make a list of affects, such as Little Hans’s impressions from the draught horse he encounters in the street, who is not representative but affective, and whose affects may be listed: being proud, having blinders, going fast, pulling a heavy load, being whipped, collapsing, kicking up a racket, and so on (Deleuze 1988: 124). The extraction of affects from a body enables the perceptive extractor to become one with the body thus perceived – the becominghorse of Little Hans, in this instance – and to participate in its physicality (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 258). Deleuze and Guattari give credit to Spinoza for calling attention to the two dimensions of the body, longitude and latitude, which are ‘the two elements of cartography’ (2000: 260–1). Cartography is a ‘rhizomatic’ practice that is future-oriented and based on experimentation with the real; it differs radically from the ‘arborescent’, past-oriented archaeology of psychoanalysis, which is based on the logic of representation (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 12ff; Deleuze 1997: 63ff). This is what children do, according to Deleuze: they are constantly ‘exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them’ (Deleuze 1997:

50  Ohad Zehavi 61). Children are cartographers by nature, constantly roaming the world and exploring it.8 A toddler at play, or even a mere infant ‘crawling about exploring the various rooms of the house he lives in’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 46–7), are practising metaphysicians. They are, from cradle, Spinozists, exploring their environment and mapping it extensively and intensively, drawing maps of constellations of bodies and of the intensive forces they manifest (Deleuze 1997: 64). In Little Hans’s case an extensive map would depict a journey (a particular one) into the street, with all its materials and voices, commotion and drama, and an intensive map (one of many possible) would be a list of affective signs emitted by the carriage horse that is encountered by Hans as it is being whipped, collapses and struggles back to its feet. This cartographical practice need not be triggered by an extraordinary event: each mundane moment and every habitual space is internally mapped in such a way. The child is thrust into a world that it immediately and constantly explores, indiscriminately. According to Deleuze’s metaphysics, the world that the child maps is the Body without Organs (BwO). This is a concept that Deleuze and Guattari draw from Artaud (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 150) but invest with Spinozist metaphysical traits, for ‘after all, is not Spinoza’s Ethics the great book of the BwO?’ (153). Ultimately the BwO seems to stand in for the all-encompassing Substance, a boundless field of pure immanence (153–4). The body in question is not ‘my’ body, it is not anyone’s personal body: it is rather ‘me’, as a subject, that is on a vast Body without Organs full of partial objects/desiring-machines (as per Anti-Oedipus) or intensities (as per A Thousand Plateaus), crossing thresholds and changing with every intensity that is crossed, with every experienced state (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 16, 20; 2000: 153, 161). In explicating the notion of BwO, Deleuze and Guattari often mention the Dogon people’s cosmological mythology, featuring an egg of no extension and pure intensity, before the organisation of the organism and the extension of organs (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 153, 164). Within this mythological account of the Spinozist BwO two moments are especially pertinent. First, the designation, in AntiOedipus, of the real and material maternal placenta as a metonym for the BwO: It is because the placenta, as a substance common to the mother and to the child, a common part of their bodies, makes it such that these bodies are not like cause and effect, but are both products derived from this same substance, in relation to which the son is his mother’s twin. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 158)

Undoing the Parent-Function  51 This may suggest that the child occupies, from the very beginning, a Body without Organs, an immanent body of innumerable forms, which it never ceases to explore. But it also paints a picture of an unusual relationship between the parent and child, who are habitually regarded as separate and stratified entities. This picture is made clearer in another concrete derivation from the Dogon myth, this time in A Thousand Plateaus: The BwO is a childhood block, a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the child ‘before’ the adult, or the mother ‘before’ the child: it is the strict contemporaneousness . . . of the adult and the child, their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be either parents or children (organic representation). (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 164)

The BwO is a purely material substratum populated by waves, forces, intensities and desires, all giving rise to provisional concrete bodies but imbued with the potential for an infinite number of bodies, each of which would emerge out of a specific becoming. Seen in this light, becoming takes place across this all-pervasive, vibrating physicality; it produces provisional affective bodies – a body here, a body there – that evade organic representation and classification (human/animal, man/ woman, adult/child), but manifest a real and concrete co-presence. A short tale by Franz Kafka, titled ‘Wish to Become a Red Indian’, can be used to illustrate this metaphysical procedure: Oh to be a Red Indian, ready in an instant, riding a swift horse, aslant in the air, thundering again and again over the thundering earth, until you let the spurs go, for there weren’t any spurs, until you cast off the reins, for there weren’t any reins, and you scarcely saw the land ahead of you as close-cropped scrub, being already without horse’s neck and horse’s head! (Kafka 2009: 15)

The land is a plane of immanence, a particular Body without Organs with zero intensity. It is traversed by a gallop, an intensive wave that makes the earth thunder. On this wave apparently ride two bodies, but very quickly we learn that it is in fact a single body, swept by a gallop, with no reins and no spurs (for there weren’t any to begin with) and not even the neck and head of a horse. In fact, this pure intensity traversing the BwO brings about a centaur-like creature, when two allegedly separate bodies, driven by the same intensity, a shared affect, a common desire, become one, just like the double-headed body formed by the placenta. This could be described, in Deleuzian terms, as a becoming-horse,

52  Ohad Zehavi where horse and rider become, if only for the duration of their joint ride, co-present in one undifferentiated body of intensity and affect. Little Hans is also overtaken by a becoming-horse, albeit a radically different one, since the horse he encounters is a very different one from Kafka’s galloping horse:9 he picks up the horse’s affects, its manifested intensities, and propagates them within his own body, participating in the horse’s physical predicament.10 Children, Deleuze and Guattari proclaim, are prolific in becoming (2000: 273). They are bodies exploring milieus, engaging with other bodies, experiencing their affects and intensities. They have an incredible capacity to become: becoming-horse, -locomotive, -flower, -wind or -music, whatever they encounter, whatever casts its spell on them. However, children are not free to experiment with becoming as they like. For children are not only metaphysical beings exploring the world, they are also political beings subject to power relations that reterritorialise them. One such political mechanism, and quite a powerful one, is the parent-function.

The Son or Daughter and their Parents: A Political Relationship While throughout his philosophical career Deleuze was invested in metaphysics, his collaboration with Félix Guattari initiated a robust political thought, present to some extent in his earlier writings but much more overt and elaborate from Anti-Oedipus onwards (Buchanan and Thoburn 2008: 1; Patton 2000: 13). Deleuze himself declared that ‘AntiOedipus was from beginning to end a book of political philosophy’ (Deleuze 1995: 170). This political programme is manifest in almost all of his subsequent works, most notably in A Thousand Plateaus, where concepts such as ‘war machine’, ‘micropolitics’ and ‘becomingminoritarian’ give this tract a pronounced political hue. Inevitably, this growing political accent affects the notion of child, who is no longer only seen as a pure metaphysician but is now also placed within a social context of power relations, adding a political facet to Deleuze’s philosophical portrait of the child. And so, while through the prism of metaphysics one may encounter the child as a Spinozist explorer, through a political prism the child appears to be merely a Son or a Daughter, a figure whose every move and every desire, every action and passion, is referred to, and governed by, his or her parents. This tension is made most evident in Deleuze’s 1993 essay ‘What Children Say’, in which he not only expounds on the metaphysical

Undoing the Parent-Function  53 experimentation of children but places the parents in relation to this practice, after-the-(metaphysical-)fact, portraying them as sheer political figures. This, again, is done primarily through Little Hans’s experience and its psychic regulation by Hans’s parents and by Freud, but the argument is made in general terms. This is how the essay begins: ‘Children never stop talking about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them’ (Deleuze 1997: 61). So not only are children veritable cartographers, mapping their real and actual milieus, but they disclose this activity in their speech, as exemplified by Hans’s utterances relayed (and misinterpreted) in Freud’s case study, so that being attentive to their precise words might allow insight into their distinctive encounter with the world. ‘Parents are themselves a milieu that children travel through: they pass through its qualities and powers and make a map of them,’ Deleuze writes (1997: 61–2), implying that parents are not, in essence, exclusive figures in a child’s social milieu, and that they should be regarded as mere elements in a rich environment of bodies, constellations of bodies and their affects. Contrary to common belief and habit, Deleuze stresses, The father and mother are not the coordinates of everything that is invested by the unconscious. There is never a moment when children are not already plunged into an actual milieu in which they are moving about . . . The parents always occupy a position in a world that is not derived from them. (1997: 62)

The world that the child encounters is not derived from his or her parents. This metaphysical truth is constantly challenged and undermined, for parents are socially constructed as figures that do occupy a privileged place. Psychoanalysis is obviously a major manufacturer of these constructs; in fact, its whole interpretative mechanism rests on the presupposed primacy of the family, and specifically the Oedipal triad, in the unfolding of the psyche in infancy. But psychoanalysis only reinforces a general movement that Oedipalises, triangulates and domesticates the productive, metaphysical unconscious of children under the auspices of the parents or family (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 121). The family, Deleuze and Guattari write, is the social agent of psychic repression, which channels and refers all of the child’s unruly desires, boundless affectivity and unhinged intensities to the parents (119–20). So, we are still with children, and with Hans, but the philosophical landscape has altered dramatically: the immanent metaphysical field the child was roaming is suddenly engulfed by a transcendent p ­ olitical field,

54  Ohad Zehavi regulated by two authoritative figures.11 The function of the family, as a real social construct that endows concrete people with parental status, is to domesticate the nomadic explorer of intensities and desires, to confine him or her to a rigid, closed triangle. This is not, as psychoanalysis has it, a primordial structure of the unconscious derived from mythology, but a concrete, political fabrication creating imaginary hierarchy, false authority and debilitating domination. In ‘The Interpretation of Utterances’ (Deleuze et al. 2006) there is a vivid example of both the act of triangulation, performed by psychoanalytic interpretation as well as by concrete parental figures, and of Deleuze’s attempt to unravel its workings. This remarkable text is very polemical, and may raise quite a few reservations, but at the very least it invites us to carefully attend to the speech and action of children and acknowledge the gap between the child’s actual expressions and their rendering by the adult, a gap that ‘indicates maximum repression and betrayal’ (89). The child, the authors say, is beaten in advance, for ‘psychoanalysis is a formidable enterprise for preventing any production of utterances or real desires’ (89). Hans is triangulated and domesticated, brought back home and to the family, in response to every move he makes. The most vulgar manifestation of this subjugating act is, obviously, the crude interpretation of his dramatic and apparently phobia-inducing encounter with the horse as an unconscious re-enactment of his primordial castration anxiety, with the horse representing his father and its erratic bodily gestures and movements symbolising parental coitus. In this interpretative act, according to Deleuze, the real events charted by Hans – a horse being beaten and collapsing – and the real affects and desires Hans expresses – his empathetic becoming-horse – are submerged by ‘the Father-function and Mother-function’ (Deleuze et al. 2006: 96), structural functions rending Hans from his experience of the vibrant world, and from his ethical response to what he acutely perceives, and neatly placing him, through both the very act of interpretation and its specific content, back at home (96–8). But it is worth following the first exchange juxtaposed in this article, an apparently minor and insignificant one, to better see how the functions of Mother and Father are formed and manipulated – and not only in the clinic and in interpretative acts, but in real life and by everyday speech acts and actions. ‘Hans’ first movement is not complicated: he wants to go downstairs to meet his girlfriend Mariedl and sleep with her,’ say Deleuze and his co-authors (2006: 90). Indeed, Hans expresses his wish explicitly in the Freudian text: ‘I’ll just go downstairs and sleep with Mariedl’

Undoing the Parent-Function  55 (Freud 1955: 17). Freud, however, refers this wish back to the family, for in Deleuze’s view Freud ‘only knows one thing: the family-territory’ (Deleuze et al. 2006: 90). But no less interesting is Hans’s mother’s explicit response to Hans’s utterance, again appearing in Freud’s account: ‘You really want to go away from Mummy and sleep downstairs?’ she asks, and then slightly later adds, ‘if you really want to go away from Daddy and Mummy’ (Freud 1955: 17). This is the initiation of the parent-function pure and simple: the child is not regarded as a singularity expressing and propelled by its independent desires, but is placed on a matrix in which his parents are the coordinates, and his movement, which in principle is untethered, is in fact measured and evaluated in relation to Mummy and Daddy, who operate as X and Y axes on which Hans’s desires are sketched. Mummy and Daddy also physically regulate and discipline Hans’s body, for the Freudian text tells us that when Hans does ‘in fact take his clothes and go towards the staircase’, the result is that, ‘it need hardly be said, he was fetched back’ (17). So a movement downstairs, within the architectural milieu of the building, towards Mariedl, as a certain (not necessarily sexual) source of fascination and attraction (not necessarily exclusive, for who knows what other events and affects such a journey has in store for Hans), is reconfigured as a movement away from home base, that is, from Mummy and Daddy. It is as if his every movement were a function of his parents, two planets exerting upon him their unescapable gravitational force. Moreover, the mere nouns Mummy and Daddy, particularly in the way they are uttered in such instances, have a tacit, almost unapparent illocutionary force. In fact, the utterance of those nouns can be regarded as a proper speech act (Austin 1962), which does at least two things: it discriminates those two figures from the multiple figures, human and non-human, that the child encounters; and it elevates those two bodiesamong-bodies to the level of ideal functions, denying their physical presence that would render them – let us recall Deleuze’s Spinozist metaphysics – as contemporaries of the child, instead instating them as transcendent figures – so much so that even the mother, who had evolved alongside the child from the placenta on to an immanent Body without Organs, is constructed as separated and aloof. Mummy and Daddy, Father and Mother, are not primordial, mythological entities as psychoanalysis would have it, but contrived ones, formed inadvertently by the most benevolent of utterances. This basic speech act or order-word (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 75–85), Mummy or Daddy, which does not merely reiterate a primordial fact but creates an ideal yet political function, is then supplemented by

56  Ohad Zehavi many other order-words. The castration complex, for instance, if it does exist, is not a mythological formation but a political one, born from the (less benevolent) threatening speech of the mother, as in Hans’s case – ‘If you do that, I shall send for Dr. A. to cut off your widdler’ (Freud 1955: 7–8). And the mere confusion of a ‘peepee-maker’ (‘Wiwimacher’ in German) with a ‘penis’ (7), that is, the substitution of a desiring-machine having a particular set of functions with a definite sex organ, results, according to Deleuze, in the metaphysical theft of the potential ‘n sexes’ (Deleuze et al. 2006: 93–4) and the political reduction of an affective multi-sexed body to merely a boy or a girl, initiated, perhaps, with the exclamatory order-word ‘it’s a boy!’ or ‘it’s a girl!’ (Butler 1993: 22). This theft of the body affects both boys and girls, and is perpetrated in countless speech acts such as ‘stop behaving like that, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re not a tomboy’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 276). These speech acts, made by the mother-function and father-function (and simultaneously constructing those very functions), block the innumerable becomings, the innumerable sexes – for ‘locomotive, horse and sun are no less sexes than boy and girl’ (Deleuze et al. 2006: 93) – ­awaiting the child. In Deleuze and his co-authors’ rereading of the case of Freud’s Little Hans, Hans’s psychic predicament, his apparent phobia, is politically induced, and it ironically materialises in the very encounter with the horse. Not only is Hans’s ultimate attempt at deterritorialisation in becoming-animal, his ‘anti-Oedipal program’ (2006: 98), ‘broken to be retranslated into family territoriality, familial triangulation’ (99) in the tedious interpretation of both parents and Freud, the horse that Hans encounters, in sheer contrast to Kafka’s vigorous galloping horse, is a very subdued animal, itself ‘filled by affects of domestication, loss of power and sudden brutality’ that echo Hans’s own felt subordination (99). Here ‘desire confronts its own repression’ (99), becoming is blocked from every direction, and the politics of the family gets the upper hand. No wonder this desire leads to anxiety. The parent-function consists in triangulation, that is, in the imposition of regulating coordinates on singular, indefinite points.12 Children, Deleuze says, even infants, are traversed by indefinite singularities (Deleuze 1997: 65), or by immanent life (Deleuze 2006: 387). But the parent-function makes the indefinite well defined, and highly confined, imposing transcendent figures – Father, Mother – on the immanent life of the child, triangulating the nomadic distribution of singularities, domesticating the worldly Spinozist children, diminishing their powers, making them merely frail and dependent Sons and Daughters. The

Undoing the Parent-Function  57 parent-function is a political function crushing the extremely potent metaphysical child.

The Becoming-Child of the Parent: A Micropolitical Programme The whole project of Deleuze and Guattari’s 1972 Anti-Oedipus can be seen as an attempt to de-Oedipalise the social sphere, or, in other words, to do away with the parent-function. In this sense, the protagonist of that tract is not so much, as is commonly thought,13 the schizophrenic – or rather the ‘schizo’, designating a political process rather than a clinical state (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 130–7) – who resists Oedipalisation, but the child, who exists, in a sense, ‘before Oedipus’. For Oedipus could be seen as the mechanism that turns the very potent young human being into a Son or a Daughter, a political mechanism that triangulates and domesticates the child, subjecting its singularity to a parent-function. The aim of the schizoanalytical, anti-Oedipal project is therefore to liberate the child from Oedipus, to undo the parent-function, ‘to reach those regions of the orphan unconscious – indeed, “beyond all law” – where the problem of Oedipus can no longer even be raised’ (81–2). The dismantling of Oedipus should probably take place where it was initially conceived – in the head of the parent; ‘Oedipus begins in the mind of the father,’ say Deleuze and Guattari (178), and in the mind of the mother as well. The parent-function is an ideological construction inadvertently forming in the mind of the adult, and its undoing should take place there as well. Indeed, to become-child, to form a childhood block, is to rid the child of the parent-function, to dissipate the figures of the parents, in an affirmative act of forgetting: Memory yells ‘Father! Mother!’ but the childhood block is elsewhere, in the highest intensities that the child constructs with his sisters, his pal, his projects and his toys, and all the nonparental figures through which he deterritorializes his parents every chance he gets . . . But in his activity, as in his passions, he is simultaneously the most deterritorialized and the most deterritorializing figure – the Orphan. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 79)

The aim of the becoming-child of the adult is to produce an orphan child, one who has no ‘parents’, who is free from the parent-function. And no one is more apt for this political action than the so-called parent, father or mother, who is invited to shed its parental skin, so to speak, so that the child can shed its ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ skin. And the way to go about it is by actively forgetting (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 16, 24,

58  Ohad Zehavi 296): forgetting that you are a parent, forgetting that he or she is your son or daughter, letting them be – or rather become. The notion of becoming-child plays a key role in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming – for instance, in the progression of the segments of becoming they offer it is listed as second, right after becoming-woman and before becoming-animal (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 272) – but curiously it has received relatively little attention (Hickey-Moody 2013: 276), overshadowed by its two main counterparts. Consequently, it remains quite obscure, both in Deleuze’s writings and in scholarly commentary. Hence, what follows is an attempt to contextualise becoming-child and to propose a way to use it as a particular political procedure that makes sense, and has force, within Deleuze’s philosophical thought about children. The most elaborate account of the notion of becoming and the most frequent appearance of the specific notion of becoming-child seem to be in chapter 10 in Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 A Thousand Plateaus. The philosophy of becoming presented there, and specifically becomingchild, seems to have two aspects: a metaphysical one, resonating with the notion of becoming already presented earlier, in which becoming could be regarded as the basic register of a molecular ontology, and a political one, in which becoming would be an operative procedure, a micropolitical one, within a social field of powers and desires. In order to give a proper account of the political applicability of becoming-child, the argument will be woven through those two contexts. ‘All becomings are already molecular,’ state Deleuze and Guattari (2000: 272). Contrary to a molar ontology of being, the ontology of becoming sends us into a molecular realm of loose and fluid particles teeming within the sensible world enveloping us. In that sense, the child featuring in becoming-child is not ‘a clearly distinct molar entity as defined by [its] form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject’ (272), but a molecular collectivity of affects. If one is to become-child, then, one needs to unleash dormant child particles within oneself and to ride the wave, so to speak, that they form. To becomedog, Deleuze and Guattari remark (274–5), is to emit corpuscles (for instance ‘by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition’) that enter the zone of proximity to a dog molecule, thus emitting a molecular dog, in other words forming a singular point of undecidability, where human and dog are not discernible from one another, if only for a brief moment. In the same manner, one would become-child by emitting a molecular child from within. Note that becoming-child does not mean imitating some molar child, and

Undoing the Parent-Function  59 not even invoking one’s past child-being – for becoming is antimemory (294) – but producing a molecular child from within – a potential child, a singular, indefinite young human being. Since Deleuze sees children as proficient becomers, becoming-child is a very significant segment in the procession of becomings because it brings with it the very potential of many other becomings, such as becoming-animal. Becoming-child thus allows the adult to form a childhood block (294), that is, to emit a molecular child, with the capacity to keep on becoming. In the molecular metaphysics that Deleuze and Guattari invoke, becoming-child, as well as other becomings, could be used as existential tools, as it were, at the disposal of adults, allowing them to animate the myriad of dormant potentialities inhering in them, to embody vital possibilities that were previously inoperative. But we should heed the fact that in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy becoming is also explicitly regarded in political terms. In what sense, then, and in what ways can becoming-child be regarded as a political act? According to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘all becoming is a becomingminoritarian’, and ‘becoming-minoritarian is a political affair [that] necessitates . . . an active micropolitics’ (291–2). Becoming, as a political procedure, is a micropolitical action whose subject is part of a ‘majority’, that is, a dominating group, and in becoming-minoritarian he or she relinquishes their power over the dominated (291). Since children are dominated by adults, en masse and in concrete settings such as the family, it is the adult who is called on to perform the micropolitical action of becoming-child.14 But what exactly does a minoritarian politics of becoming consist of? This could be sketched out of Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?, in which they state: Artaud said: to write for the illiterate – to speak for the aphasic, to think for the acephalous. But what does ‘for’ mean? It is not ‘for their benefit’, or yet ‘in their place’. It is ‘before’. It is a question of becoming. The thinker is not acephalic, aphasic, or illiterate, but becomes so. He becomes Indian, and never stops becoming so – perhaps ‘so that’ the Indian who is himself Indian becomes something else and tears himself away from his own agony. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 109)15

Becoming, as a political affair, is always double: it is a becoming-­ minoritarian of a subject from the majority ‘so that’ a repressed member of a minority, if not the minority group as a whole, will become something else. Whenever an adult becomes-child they not only lead themselves into a zone of undecidability between adult and child, they carry the child along with them to that very zone, to such proximity and

60  Ohad Zehavi c­ ontiguity that, in a sense, they become one, neither this nor that: ‘a becoming-child of the adult taking place in the adult, a becoming-adult of the child taking place in the child, the two in contiguity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 79). As Deleuze says (about becoming-animal) in his book on Francis Bacon, ‘it is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound than any sentimental identification’ (Deleuze 2003: 25). Becoming-child is hence different and more profound than mere identification with a child. This notion is taken up again in Deleuze’s essay ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’, on Herman Melville’s novella, where Deleuze asks (1997: 76): ‘Is there a relation of identification between the attorney and Bartleby?’ The relationship between the attorney and Bartleby, Deleuze suggests, is the prototypical relationship of father and son, the attorney enacting, unwittingly, the ‘paternal function’ (77), while Bartleby threatens to drag him into a becoming (88). This implies that at stake is a possible becoming-son of a father figure, a fatherfunction – or, more generally, a becoming-child of a parent-function. Indeed, the attorney confesses that Bartleby’s strange demeanour and stubborn linguistic formula have had a surprising effect on him: ‘There was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner touched and disconcerted me’ (Melville 1985: 69–70). After he fires order-words at Bartleby, like a proper father figure, trying to bring him to cooperate and coordinate – in other words, trying to domesticate and subordinate him – Bartleby’s clever evasion disarms the attorney and touches him, inviting him to undo the fabricated distance and hierarchy and become-Bartleby. Strangely enough, rather than the attorney getting rid of the incompliant Bartleby, his life is driven off track as he devotes himself to Bartleby’s unclear cause. Is it a case of identification, then? If there is identification, says Deleuze, it is psychotic: [A] zone of indistinction, of indiscernibility, or of ambiguity seems to be established between two terms, as if they had reached the point immediately preceding their respective differentiation . . . an extreme proximity, an absolute contiguity . . . It is no longer a question of Mimesis, but of becoming. (Deleuze 1997: 78)

The attorney becomes-Bartleby, and so father becomes-son and son becomes-father and both are swept away from their prefabricated categories and automatic functions. The result is ‘a function of universal fraternity that no longer passes through the father, but is built on the ruins of the paternal function’ (78). With the dissolution of the fatherfunction, the singularity of the ostensible son re-emerges. Apparently, it

Undoing the Parent-Function  61 takes a father figure that is a man of law to see the son figure ‘before the law’ – before the law of the father that makes him his son and crushes his nomadic singularity. This singularity then comes forth as ‘a brother’ (84) – no longer a ‘son’, and no longer belonging to the so-called father. The political act of becoming-child can undo the oppressive parentfunction and reinstate a primordial fraternity and a metaphysical copresence. When a parent becomes-child, when he or she forgets that they are a parent and the child is their son or daughter, the so-called father or mother and the so-called son or daughter, the presumed adult and the presumed child, become once again contemporaries, encountering the world side by side, on equal terms. And so, once the majoritarian politics of the parent-function is undone by the minoritarian micropolitics of becoming-child, the Spinozist metaphysical child – the expert explorer of milieus, the adept and prolific becomer – can resurface.

Notes   1. See also Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 9.   2. On the girl in Deleuze see, e.g., Driscoll 2001, Jackson 2010, Zehavi 2018.  3. See, e.g., Deleuze 1990: 10: ‘As a general rule, only little girls understand Stoicism; they have the sense of the event and release an incorporeal double.’ In view of this, it seems rather odd that in his elaborate and quite poignant account of The Logic of Sense, James Williams ignores the figure of the little girl almost completely, but for a very laconic and quite dismissive regard of it (Williams 2008: 153–4).  4. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari regard Spinoza as ‘the prince of philosophers’ (1994: 48) and as ‘the Christ of philosophers . . . the infinite becoming-philosopher’ (60).   5. The last concept, ‘becoming’, is highly influenced by Nietzsche.   6. The Spinozist child, according to Deleuze, sees this particular body part, or partial object, as peepee-maker (‘Wiwimacher’ in German), that is, as a specific desiring-machine that is not derived from a whole and is not necessarily ascribed to a living being. That is why he discovers it not only in a lion and a horse, in his mother and his sister (Driscoll, Garland and Hickey-Moody 2011: 121–2), but also in a train engine – something Freud (1955: 9) acknowledges himself but then dismisses, reducing this recurring partial object to genital sexuality.   7. Note that Deleuze’s Spinozist child is a substantially different figure from (and should not be confused with) ‘Spinoza’s child as read by Deleuze’ (HickeyMoody 2013: 274).   8. In this they allegedly exhibit the potential, persisting capacity of every human being – a capacity which degenerates (but does not dissipate) as a consequence of political acts, as is shown in the next part.   9. See, e.g., Deleuze 1988: 124: ‘There are greater differences between a plow horse or draft horse and a race horse than between an ox and a plow horse.’ 10. This is what Deleuze and Guattari (2000: 258) term ‘unnatural participation’. 11. The argument in this chapter might seem to focus on the boy, rather than on the girl, but this is inconsequential and due only to the fact that it draws extensively

62  Ohad Zehavi on Deleuze’s comments on Freud’s Little Hans (and on Melville’s Bartleby). Moreover, clear parallels could be drawn to the philosophical persona of the girl appearing explicitly in Deleuze’s writings: while the little girl figures in The Logic of Sense as a Stoic metaphysician and champion of sense and nonsense, in A Thousand Plateaus the young adolescent girl seems to be under the sway of numerous speech acts and other oppressive acts stealing the body from her (see, e.g., Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 276), equally charging the girl with both a metaphysical capacity and a political subordination. 12. On singularities in Deleuze see Williams 2008: 91–7. 13. See, e.g., Holland 1999: 100–1; Lambert 2000: 139. 14. See also Zehavi 2018. 15. In this view Kafka’s short tale (2009: 15) may be seen as an illustration not only of a becoming-horse, but also of a becoming-Indian (from which the becominghorse ensues), suggesting that this dense vignette is bursting with metaphysical and political implications.

References Austin, J. L. (1962), How to Do Things with Words, London: Oxford University Press. Buchanan, I. and N. Thoburn (2008), ‘Deleuze and Politics’, introduction to I. Buchanan and N. Thoburn (eds), Deleuze and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–12. Butler, J. (1993), ‘Critically Queer’, GLQ, 1: 17–32. Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, ed. C. V. Boundas, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.  W. Smith and M.  A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D.  W. Smith, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2006), ‘Immanence: A Life’, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 384–9. Deleuze, G. (2007), ‘Responses to a Series of Questions’, in R. Mackay (ed.), Collapse III, Falmouth: Urbanomic, pp. 39–43. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2000), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. et al. (2006), ‘The Interpretation of Utterances’, in G. Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 89–112.

Undoing the Parent-Function  63 Driscoll, C. (2001), ‘The Little Girl’, in G. Genosko (ed.), Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 3, New York: Routledge, pp. 1464–79. Driscoll, C., C. Garland and A. Hickey-Moody (2011), ‘(Hetero)sexing the Child: Hans, Alice and the Repressive Hypothesis’, in F. Beckman (ed.), Deleuze and Sex, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 117–34. Freud, S. (1955), ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy [“Little Hans”]’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 10, trans. J. Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 1–149. Hickey-Moody, A. C. (2013), ‘Deleuze’s Children’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45 (3): 272–86. Holland, E. W. (1999), Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, New York: Routledge. Jackson, A. Y. (2010), ‘Deleuze and the Girl’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23 (5): 579–87. Kafka, F. (2009), The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. J. Crick, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lambert, G. (2000), ‘On the Uses and Abuses of Literature for Life’, in I. Buchanan and J. Marks (eds), Deleuze and Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 135–66. Melville, H. (1985), ‘Bartleby’, in Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, London: Penguin Books, pp. 57–99. Patton, P. (2000), Deleuze and the Political, London: Routledge. Smith, D. W. (2003), ‘Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought’, in P. Patton and J. Protevi (eds), Between Deleuze and Derrida, London: Continuum, pp. 46–66. Villani, A. (2014), ‘The Problem of an Immanent Metaphysics’, trans. A. Beaulieu, E. Kazarian and J. Sushytska, foreword to A. Beaulieu, E. Kazarian and J. Sushytska (eds), Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics, London: Lexington Books, pp. vii–x. Williams, J. (2008), Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zehavi, O. (2018), ‘Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Child: A Joint Political Pro­ gramme’, in R. Rosen and K. Twamley (eds), Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes?, London: UCL Press, pp. 241–56.

Chapter 4

Beyond Surface Articulation: Alice and the Hermunculus

Helen Palmer

In order to talk about and develop Deleuze’s Alice, the left-hand side of this text makes use of an adolescent relic. This is a short story I wrote when I was about nineteen years old and came across recently. This was written before I discovered Deleuze but contains some interesting resonances with his thought, and perhaps opens things up in a different way by proposing another Alice, an abject Alice, perched within the liminal space of puberty and struggling with a literalised bad object which is nothing but her own corporeal and permeable surface.

Facehole Introverted and of average intelligence, Kim reached the age of fourteen having trawled through all the predictable emotions during her adolescence with a deliberately sullen and slowmoving gracelessness. She spent her after-school hours sitting in the bedroom of her mother’s house in the evenings and staring closely into the mirror, admiring

Multiplying the Surface ‘Alice progressively conquers surfaces. She rises or returns to the surface. She creates surfaces.’ (Deleuze 1998: 21)

This quotation is from Deleuze’s very short essay on Lewis Carroll in Essays Critical and Clinical: Deleuze presents Alice as an adolescent ‘becoming’ subject, climbing to the surface of sense and operating from this surface position armoured by the logics of Wittgensteinian language games, Victorian etiquette and Euclidean geometry, adapting quickly each time these logics are challenged but just about retaining her sense of

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small creases and wrinkles, procuring contortion after grotesque contortion, half horrified and half delighted by the series of faces leering back at her. If Kim looked for long enough she noticed that her face seemed to move of its own accord in rhythm to the shapes of her thoughts. The muscle fibres presented a kind of zombie dance, simultaneously chained to and liberated from the constraints of her peculiar will. She discovered the facehole, however, not during one of these exploratory mirror sessions but sitting alone on the bus. This is what Kim normally did on the bus. It was a kind of monomania. Her hand would unconsciously stray to her face, fingering dermatological anomalies with a ferocious repetitive movement, seeking out

propriety throughout. In his extended treatment of Carroll in The Logic of Sense, however, Deleuze creates Alice herself as a conceptual persona for his own surface of language or sense. This chapter will look more closely at Alice herself as surface: the materiality of her body and the way she problematises, amongst other things, the oppositions of internality and externality, and more broadly the Cartesian mind-body dualism. Using Alice as a fictional persona who both embodies and expresses the paradoxical elements powering the system outlined in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops the links between language and corporeality already abounding in both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. This chapter develops some of the feminist scholarship around bodies and language in order to determine the ways that we can see the corporeality of language as a question of patriarchy. Alice’s eyes are blue. And red. She opened them while going through the mirror. Except for that, she still seems to be exempt from violence. (Irigaray 1985: 9)

Irigaray begins her 1977 text This Sex Which Is Not One with the story of an alternative Alice. The text to the left of this column is yet another one of these alternatives: my own alternative. The temptation to rewrite, update, adapt; to do ‘more’ with Alice; to go ‘further’, has been felt by

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scales, scabs, scars, rough patches, blocked sebuminous bumps. A mental note would be made of the whereabouts of these facial aberrations, which would be attacked with relish once she had reached the deceptive privacy of her bedroom mirror. There was a secret patch of wall underneath her little table on which she would streak the fruits of these facial forages: yellowish-green lumps, globules, oily secretions, more often than not curlicued with her bright blood because it was only satisfying once she had discovered she bled. This was a private long-term harvest, soothing proof of her enduring life if only at a bacterial level. Each particle of semi-coagulated liquid was a particle of her own self, liberated from the main bulky mass that

many writers and thinkers, and this desire is worth paying attention to. There is a sense that Alice’s adventures encompass the struggles felt by many humans in terms of challenges to identity, perception and political and social organisation. Carroll’s Alice encounters many beings who push her onto-epistemological boundaries, but despite her changes in size, the surface of her own body remains intact. She does not absorb and is not absorbed, thus, as surface, she remains intact. The opposition between bodies and language, between ‘word’ and ‘thing’, is something Deleuze plays in between throughout The Logic of Sense. The surface inheres between oppositions and therefore problematises them. The tension between literality and figurality in language is very much highlighted in Carroll’s tales, but the use of Carroll to embody the development of poststructuralist linguistic theory from pre-Socratic to contemporary times is Deleuze’s creation. Whilst acknowledging Carroll’s position as Victorian recreational mathematician, Deleuze alternatively presents Carroll interpenetrating with the Stoics as a hinge on which protoand post-structuralism pivot, forcing the distinction drawn by Saussure between synchronic and diachronic linguistics into an interpenetrating n-dimensional spatiotemporality. ‘Structuralism, whether consciously or not, celebrates new findings of a Stoic and Carrollian inspiration’

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was her body and streaked onto the inoffensive peach wallpaper. Squeezing with sharp nails: drawing blood, picking at blameless flaps of skin, digging until there was nothing but a tiny, raw, concave surface. A crater. But the facehole was different. Sitting on the nearly empty bus, hand clasping face in the usual manner, right palm cupping chin, right thumb stroking right cheek, right index finger worrying identical area in centre of left cheek. Affecting a ponderous look. Kim was sometimes surprised that the skin in this area did not look more threadbare than the rest and was still fighting, cells still reduplicating its cells despite the constant fretting, worrying, rubbing of the smooth hollow below the left cheekbone.

(Deleuze 2004: 83). Deleuze presents Carroll as a proto-poststructuralist and then uses Alice as a moveable lever who operates between both sides. She is, in fact, ‘the frontier, the cutting edge, or the articulation of difference’ (Deleuze 2004: 35). This is Deleuze’s description of sense, but in her movements and utterances throughout Wonderland Alice operates as a figure who embodies this frontier or articulation. A frontier or a surface presupposes two opposite facing sides. As Deleuze also explains, sense is the articulation of difference between bodies and propositions; between word and thing.1 As Deleuze says in his essay on Carroll and drawing on Stoicism, ‘Pure events escape from states of affairs’ (Deleuze 1998: 21). The Stoics distinguish between pure events and their spatiotemporal actualisation in states of affairs. The distinction is therefore a binary opposition between corporeal and incorporeal. On one hand is the corporeal realm of bodies and states of affairs, and on the other is the incorporeal realm of time, place and sense. Events are the entities that complexify the opposition, as does language itself. They are not, however, identical to one another. Events are incorporeal transformations, but they have corporeal effects. The articulation of difference is precisely this surface requiring both sides. As Deleuze points out here, the tension within language between these supposed oppositions is precisely what underpins s­tructuralism

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Although today it didn’t feel quite smooth. Kim detected a tiny grain under the pad of her index finger, like a grain of salt or perhaps one of those pimples so small they feel almost wholly detachable from the surface of your skin. But it wasn’t as simple as that. The grain felt it right back. It felt her: it responded. It actually felt her finger. Anemone-like, it seemed to move ever so slightly as her finger brushed over it. It was influenced by the motion. And it was sensitive to her touch. It was phenomenally sensitive. There was no pain; no irritated broken skin or greasy blackhead mass blocked just inside the pore’s entrance. Rather, something new had grown. Something had generated. ‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ the family doctor

and is apprehended by Carroll through the ludic. Deleuze begins The Logic of Sense with Alice. ‘It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa’ (Deleuze 2004: 3). Alice is the figure who embodies the pure event of sense, growing and shrinking at the same time. This ‘becoming’ eludes the present because ‘it does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future’ (Deleuze 2004: 3). This is later described as the Aion or ‘pure and empty form of time’ (Deleuze 2007: 108) outlined in both Difference and Repetition and ‘On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy’ in Essays Critical and Clinical. Because The Logic of Sense is predominantly about language, however, the pure and empty form of time becomes the pure infinitive verb. ‘As it expresses all language events in one, the infinitive verb expresses the event of language – language being a unique event which merges now with that which renders it possible’ (Deleuze 2004: 212). Alice-as-surface encapsulates the paradoxical coincidence of the literal and the figurative modes of language, expressed in the Stoic lekton – language as both word and thing – as well as the coincidence of langue and parole expressed within the infinitive verb. Deleuze’s use of the infinitive verb, and its linking to both corporeality and

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told her a few days later while she squirmed under the scrutiny and her mother waited and worried outside. ‘Just a sign of growing up. Just be sure to come back if anything happens.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘If it – grows, or if it changes colour, or anything. You can’t be too careful with moles.’ So Kim clasped her hand protectively to her cheek and went home. It didn’t grow at first. She very quickly became obsessed with touching this tiny bump in her cheek, an exquisite pinprick that seemed to radiate some new sensibility. It spoke to her. It grew used to her caresses and if she did not pay it enough attention it would howl and scream. This tiny blotch on her face was in some way her abject offspring.

­ sychoanalysis, draws on Irigaray’s p text ‘On Phantasm and the Verb’ in To Speak Is Never Neutral. One of the verbs Irigaray uses as an example is to absorb. The power relations inherent in this grammatical process are immediately apparent. ‘To absorb implies that something in the world, exterior to the subject, is brought into its sphere, or its space. What was exterior and foreign becomes interior and part of the subject, assimilated by the subject’ (Irigaray 2002: 56). The particularities of this verb in corporeal and alimentary terms are discussed further later in the chapter, but for the purposes of discussions around becoming and Alice’s growing/shrinking simultaneity, it is important to acknowledge Deleuze’s argument that the infinitive form of the verb is the only form to uphold every potential materialisation at the same time, demonstrating the power of formal linguistic structures to affirm multiplicity and unity at the same time – or, as Deleuze and Guattari later put it, ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’ (2004: 23).

Striking the Surface It is interesting that Deleuze chooses Alice at this particular stage in his career, when his relationship to psychoanalysis is more complex than an outright rejection, and when in fact a good deal of The Logic of Sense is devoted to some interesting readings of Klein. Klein’s world is particularly resonant for Carroll’s Wonderland.

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After a few weeks, it did begin to grow, and once this process had begun, it continued rapidly. Kim grew used to sitting in the classroom at school with her chin resting on one hand, fingers splayed over the offending mark to avoid comment or ridicule. Even whilst walking she affected this pose. Everywhere she went she looked quizzical, philosophical even, when in fact she was simply trying to blend into the background. She looked forward with an aching urgency every day to the time when she could safely escape into her bedroom and stare at the facehole in her mirror. It grew. It was a perfectly regular circle and it changed its hue every day. Sometimes it would throb violet and lavender, emitting a cloying

Even a cursory glance at Klein’s writings demonstrate that in her work, infantile, latent and adolescent stages of childhood are all contingent upon this surface which not only permits both phantasy and reality, but actively blends the two. In Klein’s violent world of object relations, children not only have sexual desires from infancy; they also have anxieties, neuroses and guilt. Klein advocates the use of play-analysis to work through early infantile anxieties. The outcome of play-analysis illustrates the Kleinian infant entering a chaotic world of part objects. The breast is such an object. The breast is the prototypical part object. It is both good and bad. The Kleinian world is one of aggression and violence from birth, and, as Deleuze is well aware, very much like the violent and literalist Wonderland. Klein perceives infants to operate in the same way as adults suffering from psychoses. In Kleinian psychoanalysis, all aspects of mental life are tied to object relations. Noreen O’Connor (O’Connor and Ellis 2010) asks what Klein’s theories would have been like if she had not assumed a split between the inner and the outer worlds. She also importantly points out that the reduction of all human expression to a finite number of symbolic objects renders Klein’s theory of language as one that separates out language and thought, or one in which meaning exists outside linguistic practices. According to O’Connor, this means that Klein’s theory is in line with

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grandmotherish scent and producing a gentle vibration somewhere around concert pitch A. Other days it stung jagged red. Darts and flashes of pain emanating from its centre attacked Kim’s senses, but she could never detect whether they were shooting from the inside out or the outside in. Occasionally its flat surface was a malignant and dull black, silent and worrisome. She touched it less and less. She stopped going to school once it had reached the size of a fiftypence piece. She began to understand its logic. It was a kind of portal or black hole. Its surface would occasionally pucker and crease but it never broke. She thought that nothing solid could pass through its malleable surface, but this thought was dispelled one day

essentialist, universalist, foundational theories. According to Wilson (2015: 50), Klein perceives the child as ‘war-torn and tyrannical’ whereas Winnicott perceives the child in a more positive light and promotes the theory of the transitional object as the initial possession of the child that is ‘notme’ (Winnicott 2005: 6). Deleuze continues along tyrannical lines, placing Klein along with Artaud in the thinking of depths, rather than Carroll, whom he aligns with the surface. The Kleinian nursing infant is, for Deleuze, ‘stage, actor and drama at once’ of what he describes as the Kleinian ‘theatre of terror’ (Deleuze 2004: 215). The way in which Deleuze describes the Kleinian process of the splitting of the breast and body of the mother into partial objects is mirrored almost exactly with his description of Louis Wolfson’s treatment of the ‘mother tongue’. Wolfson felt the need to translate instantaneously from the mother tongue in order to protect himself from what he felt were physically damaging particles of language. The parallels with Kleinian partial objects are clear, and it is the materiality of the language that is being foregrounded here: the danger of the linguistic surface to cause physical harm. The threat of violence from word-objects is comparable to the Kleinian and the Carrollian models on account of their literality. Wolfson’s particular type of creative translation is not a straightforward one; he splits

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when the tip of her finger disappeared into her face and was momentarily swallowed until she snatched it back viciously and cradled it to her chest, realising only seconds later that she was frowning and snarling at something on her own face. She was frowning and snarling back at herself. As the facehole gathered momentum and grew in monstrosity, Kim surrendered herself fully to its timescale. Leaving her room only when absolutely necessary, she sat hunched in front of the mirror staring hard, humming in quiet harmony to the tones imbued in her cheek. Sometimes it flickered and flashed, like the reflection of a TV screen on a blank wall in the dark. She was dimly aware that this phenomenon was potentially something to

apart the offending word and locates a similar-sounding word for each of its components in one of the four main languages he knows. Literality is of fundamental importance here, but the real crunch and bite occurs with the realisation that literality is multifarious too. ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’ Alice screams, negating in order to foreground the good literality, in order to separate phantasy from reality, although we know that just as in infancy, childhood and adolescence, our reliance on the permeability of this separation is as vital as oxygen for breathing.

Gendering the Surface We would do well to read Klein alongside Elizabeth Grosz (1995), who challenges the mind-body dualism precisely for its relationship to other oppositional pairs. As a receptive surface, the body’s boundaries and zones are constituted in conjunctions and through linkages with other surfaces and planes: the lips connected with the breast in orality, possibly accompanied by the hand in conjunction with an ear, each system in perpetual motion and interrelation with the other . . . Libidinal intensifications of bodily parts are surface effects, interactions occurring on the surface of the skin and various organs. These effects, however, are not simply superficial, for they generate an interior, an underlying depth, individuality, or consciousness. This depth is one of the distinguishing features marking out the modern,

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be proud of, something marketable. But she wanted to keep it secret. Her mother saw her on the stairs one day and shrieked. Kim ran back into her room, heart racing and swelling in protectivity for her monstrous defect. She was also dimly aware that the facehole was edging closer and closer to her nose and mouth, but as she was powerless to halt its progress, she simply noted this with interest and wondered what would become of her. The process of osmosis occurs through a semipermeable membrane. Solids, liquids and gases may pass through, given the concentration of substances is at the appropriate level. When Kim’s face became the facehole she still breathed. Its unspeakably agile musculature covered the entire surface of her

Western capitalist body from other kinds. (Grosz 1995: 34)

The gendered nature of the challenge to Cartesian reason has been well mapped out by Grosz and described as ‘the crisis of reason’s inability to know itself, to enclose and know itself from the outside: the inadequation of the subject and knowledge’ (Grosz 1995: 26). Here it is important to point out the implicit references to adolescence as the process of gendered ‘becoming’ in both Deleuze and Carroll. Whilst Alice in Wonderland is classified as a book for children, the challenges faced by Alice – extreme growing and shrinking, experimentation with substances, encountering unknown patterns of discourse and behaviour, environmental abnormalities and subversion of expectations, the fear of being rejected by peers and an overall suffusion of existential doubt – these are all themes that are common to adolescent as well as literary and philosophical life. Alice’s embodiment and animation of certain philosophical realms has been extremely well documented for many decades (see Gardner 1960 for the originary commentary on Alice, Lecercle 1994 for a helpful focus on nonsense, and Davis 2010 for a more populist approach). Aside from a proto-structuralist, Carroll could equally be described as a proto-surrealist (see McAra 2011). The most obvious linking point, as McAra outlines, is the perception of

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cranium and burst open its dimensions, turning her inside out. The facehole was one multisensory organ: mouth, ear, eye and nose. She could perceive things, but the outside world was blended with vast internal projections. When she tried to speak, liquids, solids and vapours of every description emanated from the facehole. No discernible language was heard. When she tried to eat or drink, whole objects were snatched from her hands and immediately swallowed up, sucked in by the forcefield which flowed in all directions and dimensions. When she looked in the mirror the glass shrieked at her in anger for presenting such a monstrous impossibility. Facehole. She knew exactly what she had to do. She raised

Alice as the traditional femme-enfant, or woman-child. This figure is conventionally ‘a manipulable, fairylike muse, enchanting in her innocence, youth and purity’ (Belton 1993: 65). This description is obviously worthy of a plethora of feminist criticisms in terms of agency and patriarchal dominance, but in addition to those we can also go further in using Deleuze’s embodiment of Alice in order to discern a newer, more grotesque, more adolescent Alice whose problematisation of spatiotemporal dimensions is more directly linked to power. Whilst the hyphen conjoining femme and enfant arguably operates as a spatiotemporal shift resulting in a dynamic transition between two states, Deleuze’s initial presentation of Alice as embodying ‘the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present’ (2004: 3) is a more radical challenge to any notion of staticity whatsoever.

Permeating the Surface The anthropomorphisation of food and its reverse, the rendering-edible of words, is a device found everywhere in the Alice books and I have discussed this elsewhere (Palmer 2014: 154). In his well-documented criticism of Carroll, Artaud describes Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’ as ‘the work of a man who ate well’ (1988: 448). This does not appear to have been the case according to Carroll’s biographers. ‘He himself ate very little: one meal a day, only. He was

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one shaking hand and slowly brought it near to her sinewy orifice organ. Kim mustered her courage and prepared to become her facehole. She gasped as her hand, then her arm, was quickly sucked in. Facehole. She did not know where she would pop out, where the other side of this portal would be or even if there was another side. She was amoeba; she was jelly. Facehole. She crumpled and folded as she rejected the bones she knew and became wholly and completely facehole. She made no sound, emitted no cry of defeat because who was to say this was defeat and not success? Facehole. Kim alighted. Kim stretched. She was sticky. The mouth of the river was wide and brown. Her mother’s face, knowing, grimly satisfied with a tight

ram-rod straight to the end of his life, thin as a rail, and thought little of taking twenty-five mile walks . . . For a man who was so austere in his tastes, food held his interest and dominates the imagery of his jokes from his juvenilia onwards’ (Warner 2004). Virginia Woolf writes brilliantly about Carroll’s own supposedly childlike state, characterising it very perceptively and empathetically in alimentary terms – or if not strictly alimentary, then very much in terms of a process of digestion or indigestion. If Carroll’s supposedly troublefree existence (according to him) was an ‘untinted jelly’, then contained within this jelly was a ‘perfectly hard crystal’. This crystal, according to Woolf, is childhood. For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it. And therefore as he grew older this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the man of nourishment. (Woolf 1939, in Philips 1971: 48).

The crystal is a material impossible to absorb, and material absorption is evaded by remaining at the surface. Deleuze’s comments on Alice’s alimentary obsessions precisely articulate the fears thrown up by the depths of materiality. ‘The ideal little girl, incorporeal and anorexic, and the ideal little boy, stuttering and left-handed, must disengage themselves from their real, voracious,

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smile, was bobbing next to her as she took up her place in the boat. ‘I knew you’d come through it,’ she said. Kim and her mother rowed across the brown river in silence. Inside Kim’s mouth were lumps of what felt like soil but tasted like nothing she had ever tasted before. If she opened her mouth these lumps sang. They were mouths, and they too had mouths themselves. Without looking she knew the first lumps were a lurid chlorine blue colour, because of the songs they sang. Inside these blue mouth lumps would be mouth lumps of another colour singing a different song, and inside them, more lumps, more mouths, more colours, more songs. Mouth lump concatenation. It was at this point that Kim had a realisation about the

g­luttonous, or blundering images’ (Deleuze 2004: 30). One of the points being made here is that the ingestion or absorption of food into the body is perceived by the anorexic as a threat to the body’s ideality. The body as nothing but surface could maintain a semblance of immateriality, which is perhaps the desire of the anorexic that he refers to here. Deleuze suggests that Alice is ‘overwhelmed by nightmares of absorbing and being absorbed’ (2004: 29), because whichever way round the process happens, absorption requires depth and capacity. The skin functions as the protective human corporeal surface. Amongst its many functions, it operates as the frontier touching both the interior and exterior of our bodies. Grosz highlights the importance of the skin in this function of ‘double sensation’, such as when the subject touches one part of itself with another: This is the twisting of the Möbius strip, the torsion or pivot around which the subject is generated. The double sensation creates a kind of interface of the inside and the outside, the pivotal point at which inside will become separated from outside and active will be converted into passive (a line of border which is not unlike the boundary established by the duplicating structure of the mirror, which similarly hangs on the pivotal plane represented by the tain of the mirror). (1994: 35–6).

If we consider the skin as the surface that covers the body, the shedding

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world she had come into. If mouths have mouths, then thoughts have . . . thoughts? Of course thoughts have thoughts. She was in the place where the thoughts thought their own thoughts. They alighted at a dingy bank where the grasses hissed a dry sound and everything seemed scuffed and dusty. The grasses trembled in a dry, hot wind. Kim looked along the entire horizon and thought that she could see nothing stretched along the entire line of the world in front of her, until she saw an orange lumpy figure hurtling towards them. Looking over at her mother in panic, she found no reassurance, for her mother had settled down into the boat. ‘Time for a nap,’ she was saying sleepily, lying back and closing her eyes.

and subsequent ingestion of this corporeal surface is symbolic in multiple ways. There is an interesting moment in Leonora Carrington’s surrealist story ‘The Debutante’ (1939) when the protagonist, who is a hyena disguised as a human debutante and covered in the skin of the actual debutante’s murdered maid, tears off its human-skin surface covering and eats it. This moment is interesting for a number of reasons. The literalised shedding of the ‘mask’ of feminine humanity and the beast underneath is starkly obvious, and Natalya Lusty has aligned Carrington’s story with Joan Rivière’s famous 1929 essay ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (Lusty 2007). In addition to this literalised symbolic shedding, the action of consuming one’s own outer surface presents the limit as becoming one overall orifice-object, or perhaps, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari (following Artaud again, of course), a body without organs.

Colonising the Surface The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it. ‘No room! No room!’ they cried out when they saw Alice coming. ‘There’s plenty of room!’ said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table. (Carroll 1941: 80)

Deleuze suggests in the quotation given at the beginning of this chapter that Alice conquers surfaces. The struggle to operate at the surface, or

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Kim leapt off the boat and focused her eyes on the orange shape, considering the state of things at that moment. She had somehow been ejected out of herself. She no longer had a facehole but everything in this world was facehole and was therefore part of her. She was an upturned jellyfish at low tide; upside down and forcibly externalised. She was outside in her inside. It followed therefore that if she thought hard enough about this orange figure she could determine its shape and its purpose. Surely enough, as it approached her it started to change shape and become more of a mulchy brown and flecked with synthetic orange, like a shop-bought carrot cake. Its shape changed as it moved towards her, but as she focused more on it, it

indeed to be the surface, is a power struggle. There is no doubt that the Alice books, amongst other things, are about power struggles, about Alice’s failed attempts to understand and subsequently master the rules of the game in order to survive. Alice is a foreigner and does not have allies; she is the solo navigator of an unpredictable and dangerous world. This does not, however, mean that she deserves our sympathy or celebration. There are many adolescent themes running through the Alice books. In addition to her privileged position as protagonist and narrator, the fundamental aspects separating Alice from the characters she encounters both in Wonderland and through the looking glass are her failed attempts at applying her own nascent understanding of the rules of logic and etiquette. These can be summed up, as described by Kincaid (1973), as a preoccupation with linearity and finitude. These concerns underpin much of Western thought. Kincaid’s article is interesting in its positing of Alice as the malignant force in her attempts to invade these alternative worlds, which amounts to an attempt at colonisation. Rather than the frightened and vulnerable little girl negotiating a world governed by unknown logics, Alice here is the ‘baddie’, often upsetting ‘a beautiful comic game by introducing the alien concepts of linear progression to infinity, nothingness, and death’ (Kincaid 1973: 92). Catherine Driscoll, Carina Garland and Anna Hickey-Moody have previ-

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looked more and more like a glove, a sock or a heart; something tubular with various cylindrical shapes coming out of it. It was a glove or a sock for the heart. Of course it was. When your heart grows cold you need something to keep it warm. And here it was, a bright orange heart sock, currently heartless and empty, scampering across the desert-like ground towards her. Without hearing anything Kim knew the heartsock would speak. And once it reached her, speak it did. ‘You’re not meant to be here,’ it said, in a complaining tone of voice. ‘You’re not meant to be here YET.’ ‘But where is here? And when should I be here? And why?’ Kim asked the heartsock, trying hard not to feel ridiculous conversing with an irritable

ously discussed this alongside other psychoanalytic and gendered aspects of Alice, arguing that ‘in foregrounding Alice, Deleuze chooses a figure that can only be understood within such a context: within a hegemonically heterosexual circuit of desire and within the historical emergence of girl sexuality as a discursive object’ (2011: 128). Not only is Deleuze’s Alice not a feminist hero, but she also attempts to be a child colonialist of Wonderland. In the 1990s Jon Stratton (1990) also posited Alice as a colonial force, both attempting to alter Wonderland’s judicial system and placing ontological doubt on its very category of realness in order to assert her own. Deleuze places great emphasis in The Logic of Sense on the loss of Alice’s proper name as the apex of the process of the dissolution (and critique) of subjectivity that he outlines: ‘The loss of the proper name is the adventure which is repeated throughout all Alice’s adventures’ (Deleuze 2004: 5). Alan Lopez believes that there is a disclosure of schizophrenic subjectivity in the Alice books that is mapped around the figure of Alice herself (Lopez 2004: 108). Lopez aims to posit in Carroll’s Alice books ‘the erasure of the rational and bourgeois Cartesian subject’ (2004: 116). One important moment in the process of losing her proper name is when Alice’s self-perception slips from the particular to the general when she encounters the Pigeon and the Caterpillar. When repeatedly

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carrot-cake-coloured nonsensical receptacle. Her questions seemed to throw it off slightly. ‘Well . . . that’s a good point. Maybe I’m the one who isn’t meant to be here yet. I just know that we shouldn’t be meeting here like this. We should be in a very different time and place.’ ‘What are you made of?’ she asked tentatively, not wanting to cause offence. The heartsock didn’t seem offended by the question; in fact, it was appearing calmer, its breathing slowing after its long sprint across the plains. It considered the question for a second, puffing almost imperceptibly in and out which was a kind of breathing-thinking movement, Kim supposed. ‘I’m made of sugars and starches, mostly. The worst kind of stuff you

asked ‘what’ she is, after being called a serpent, by the Pigeon, Alice eventually defines herself hesitantly as ‘a little girl’ (Carroll 1941: 62). Whilst the Pigeon hastens the development of her self-conception from an individual to a general kind of thing, the Caterpillar perceives Alice as nothing more than what Lopez describes as ‘the syntactic predicate of that grammatical “I”, an “I” that even here refers not to “Alice” but to that category of identity in which that “I” is inscribed, namely the category “little girl”’ (Lopez 2004: 117). The slipping between the particular and the generic (encapsulated in the linguistic blind spots such as ‘it’ and ‘nobody’, both of which are played with in Carroll’s work) is precisely what fascinates Carroll and precisely what Alice questions again and again. If we look beyond Alice’s subjectivity into the gendered materiality of her body, however, we may see that she is more than a fictional persona negotiating an alternative onto-epistemological landscape. She also metonymically embodies that very landscape herself.

Stretching the Surface The child accepted the strawberry suspiciously for it was, although not large, the size of her head. She sniffed it, turned it round and round, and then essayed just one little bite out of it, leaving behind a tiny ring of white within the crimson flesh. Her teeth were perfect. At the first bite, she grew a little.

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shove down your facehole.’ (It mouthed the word facehole, as if to avoid causing offence, although to whom the offence would be caused was unclear.) ‘Yep, I’m the stuff of your nightmares. But knitted together I’ll insulate your heart. Protect it from damage, as much as I can. Then in forty years I’ll kill you,’ it finished, sounding almost gleeful in this last description. Kim was less shocked than she thought she would have been hearing this. ‘Oh well, I might have had enough of the world by then anyway,’ she surmised. ‘It’s not going very well really, is it?’ The heartsock puffed a gentle assent to this. ‘The problem is, you see,’ it wheezed, ‘you shouldn’t ever be able to see me. I should be inside you. And we shouldn’t be

Kelly continued to mumble: ‘There must be some rational explanation.’ The child took a second, less tentative bite, and grew a little more. The mandrakes in their white nightgowns woke up and began to mutter among themselves. (Carter 2002: 133)

Angela Carter’s Alice in her story ‘Alice in Prague, or The Curious Room’ is transported to sixteenthcentury Prague, home to Emperor Rudolf II, who was sometimes described as the ‘mad alchemist’. Carter’s version of Alice consumes, grows, shrinks and puzzles over logical conundrums in typical Alice fashion. More singular to Carter’s tale, however, is the grotesque Arcimboldo-inspired fruit assemblage called Summer but referred to mainly as ‘it’, a female plaything created for the pleasure of the Archduke. The size and prominence of the secondary sexual characteristics indicate that this creature is, like the child, of the feminine gender. She lives in the fruit bowl . . . her hair is largely composed of green muscat grapes, her nose a pear, eyes filbert nuts, cheeks russet apples somewhat wrinkled – never mind! . . . But now, what devastation! Hair mashed, nose squashed, bosom pureed, belly juiced. (Carter 2002: 136–7)

It is easy to interpret this grotesque automaton as the abject inversion of the innocent-looking Alice. There is something even more sinister and grotesque, however, about the damage inflicted on this entity through the almost comical yet

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able to have a conversation like this, and we certainly should be able to feel different things or even exist as separate entities. But look at us here, now, having a conversation. Something has happened to us, and we’re split apart though we’re still linked somehow. It’s a bit of a mess. I’m not sure what’s to be done about it.’ Kim thought about what her mum usually advised in times when she was in a bit of a mess and didn’t know what to do. ‘We could sit down and have a cup of tea while we think about it,’ she suggested hesitantly. The heartsock paused. She imagined it was thinking about how it could feasibly imbibe a cup of tea. ‘Sure, why not,’ it said unconvincingly, sounding much less sure than the word suggested. ‘I just might need a bit of help.’

disturbing penetration she endures from the Archduke. Another female body reduced to an inventory of anatomical fragments, but this time the fragments are consumable and perishable in a very literal sense. This being is a gendered conflation of the eating/speaking duality outlined in The Logic of Sense. The medicalsounding language used here of ‘size and prominence of secondary sexual characteristics’ brings to mind outdated masculinist descriptions of a particular type of homunculus: the cortical homunculus (see Penfield 1950 and Gorman 1969).2 The homunculus has been historically understood as a miniature version of a man, created artificially by alchemical means. Within t­wentieth-century neuroscience the homunculus constitutes an attempt at a direct visual mapping of the ways that the brain feels the body’s sensations. The amount of cerebral cortex devoted to any given body region is proportional to how richly innervated that region is, rather than the physical size of that part of the body. Areas of the body with greater or more complex sensory or motor connections are represented as larger in the homunculus; those with fewer or less complex connections are represented as smaller. The resulting image we get is of a distorted human body, with disproportionately huge hands, lips and face. The cortical sensory homunculus provides us with an alternative type of proportionality which exists and

Beyond Surface Articulation  83

In her mind, the drinking of tea in this sort of environment would have been the quintessential English colonial event: white tablecloths, bone china teacups, pinkies extended, and polite manners expressed crossly. The juxtaposition with utter nonsense was perfect and somehow predictable. But when her mind tried to focus on this, it swerved every time, and when some objects began to appear in front of her, they did not conform to this stereotype at all. What began to form from nothing and at first looked like purple blobs but then began to take a more decided shape, were a pair of sturdy plastic beakers, the kind for toddlers. Except they were not designed for regular human use, because they had all manner of strawlike cylindrical apertures

need not be perceived as secondary to physical extension in space. Similarly, the homunculus does not need to be subsumed under the universal masculine default either. In a development (and feminist criticism) of Freud’s definition of the ego as a measure of the degree of libidinal cathexis the subject has invested in its own body, Grosz looks to neurological theories of the early twentieth century, particularly the figure of the cortical homunculus. Grosz criticises twentieth-century neurologists such as Gorman for their ‘manifest sexism’, stating that there is no mention of a female homunculus, nor is there any suggestion that the homunculus figure might differ for women (1994: 35). In order to address this in the twentyfirst century, a group of neuroscientists published an article entitled ‘The Hermunculus: What Is Known about the Representation of the Female Body in the Brain?’ (di Noto et al. 2012). This article provides the beginnings of a sexually differentiated ‘hermunculus’ that would take into account both the different body surfaces and internal organs, and ‘the plasticity that may well occur during different reproductive life stages, including pregnancy, menopause, and the ovarian cycle’ (di Noto et al. 2012: 2). They conclude that both an updated male homunculus and a new, explicitly female hermunculus would be extremely beneficial for neuroscientific iconography and therapeutic resources.

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sticking out. In fact, they were formed exactly like miniature versions of the heartsock. The impossibility of ingestion presented itself as each little purple receptacle burst out a high, sharp cackle. ‘Fuck,’ the heartsock expostulated, wheezing slightly. ‘I should have known.’

It occurs to me that the treatment Carroll’s Alice is subjected to in The Logic of Sense amounts to a presentation of her as a kind of hermunculus. The polysemy of le sens cements this. The creation of a conceptual persona (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994) is a type of metonymy, but it is also a process of alchemy. Fictional characters are like golems: little beings who reduplicate themselves as they are rewritten and given life. To return to the quotation from Deleuze with which this chapter begins: ‘She creates surfaces. Movements of penetration and burying give way to light lateral movements of sliding; the animals of the depths become figures on cards without thickness’ (1998: 21). Alice and her fictional spawn help us to see that the multifarious surface and the organisational body it houses is gendered; it is dynamic; it is permeable and it does indeed have thickness.

Notes 1. For further analyses of sense and its relation to the Stoic lekton as well as the futurist materiality of language, see Palmer 2014. 2. The Deleuzian (and Carrollian) aspects of Carter’s tale have been explored in Thomas 2009.

References Artaud, A. [1940] (1988), incomplete letter to Henri Parisot, in Selected Writings, ed. S. Sontag, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 448. Beckman, F. (ed.) (2011), Deleuze and Sex, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Belton, R. J. (1993), ‘Androgyny: Interview with Meret Oppenheim’, in M. A. Caws, R. Kuenzli and G. Raaberg (eds), Surrealism and Women, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, pp. 64–76. Byrne, C. (ed.) (1998), Lewis Carroll, London: British Council. Carrington, L. (1975), The Oval Lady, Other Stories: Six Surreal Stories, Santa Barbara: Capra.

Beyond Surface Articulation  85 Carroll, L. [1865] (1941), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Clinton, MA: Colonial Press. Carter, A. [1994] (2002), American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, New York: Vintage. Caws, M. A., R. Kuenzli and G. Raaberg (eds) (1993), Surrealism and Women, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Davis, R. B. (ed.) (2010), Alice and Wonderland and Philosophy: Curiouser and Curiouser, Hoboken: Wiley. Deleuze, G. [1993] (1998), ‘Lewis Carroll’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco, London and New York: Verso, pp. 21–2. Deleuze, G. [1969] (2004), The Logic of Sense, ed. C. V. Boundas, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. [1968] (2007), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari [1991] (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson, London and New York: Verso. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari [1980] (2004), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London and New York: Continuum. di Noto, P. M., L. Newman, S. Wall and G. Einstein (2012), ‘The Hermunculus: What Is Known about the Representation of the Female Body in the Brain?’, Cerebral Cortex, 23 (5): 1005–13; available at (last accessed 7 June 2018). Driscoll, C., C. Garland and A. Hickey-Moody (2011), ‘(Hetero)sexing the Child: Hans, Alice and the Repressive Hypothesis’, in F. Beckman (ed.), Deleuze and Sex, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 117–34. Gardner, M. (1960), The Annotated Alice, New York: Clarkson Potter. Gorman, W. (1969), Body Image and the Image of the Brain, St. Louis: W.  H. Green. Grosz, E. (1994), Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Grosz, E. (1995), Space, Time and Perversion: Essays in the Politics of Bodies, New York and London: Routledge. Irigaray, L. (1985), This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter with C. Burke, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, L. [1985] (2002), To Speak Is Never Neutral, trans. G. Schwab, London and New York: Continuum. Kincaid, J. (1973), ‘Alice’s Invasion of Wonderland’, PMLA, 88 (1): 92–9. Klein, M. [1932] (1997), The Psycho-Analysis of Children, trans. A. Strachey, London: Vintage. Lecercle, J. (1994), Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature, London: Routledge. Lopez, A. (2004), ‘Deleuze with Carroll: Schizophrenia and Simulacrum and the Philosophy of Lewis Carroll’s Nonsense’, Angelaki, 9 (3): 101–20. Lusty, N. (2007), Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. McAra, C. (2011), ‘Surrealism’s Curiosity: Lewis Carroll and the Femme-Enfant’, Papers of Surrealism, 9: 1–25; available at (last accessed 7 June 2018). Maisonnat, C., J. Paccaud-Huguet and A. Ramel (eds) (2009), Rewriting/Reprising in Literature: The Paradoxes of Intertextuality, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. O’Connor, N. and M. L. Ellis (2010), Questioning Identities: Philosophy in Psychoanalytic Practice, London: Karnac.

86  Helen Palmer Palmer, H. (2014), Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Penfield, W. (1950), The Cerebral Cortex of Man: A Clinical Study of Localization of Function, New York: Macmillan. Philips, R. (ed.) (1971), Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as Seen through the Critics’ Looking Glasses 1865–1971, New York: Vanguard Press. Stratton, J. (1990), Writing Sites: A Genealogy of the Postmodern World, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Thomas, K. (2009), ‘Angela Carter’s Adventures in the Wonderland of Nonsense’, in C. Maisonnat, J. Paccaud-Huguet and A. Ramel (eds), Rewriting/Reprising in Literature: The Paradoxes of Intertextuality, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 35–42. Warner, M. [1972] (2004), Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture, London: Chatto & Windus. Wilson, E. (2015), Gut Feminism, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Winnicott, D. W. [1970] (2005), Playing and Reality, London and New York: Routledge. Woolf, V. [1939] (1971), ‘Lewis Carroll’, in R. Philips (ed.), Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as Seen through the Critics’ Looking Glasses 1865–1971, New York: Vanguard Press, pp. 47–9.

Chapter 5

Pathways through the Labyrinth: Deleuze’s Gothic Child in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) Anna Powell

Who does not haunt the perverse territorialities, beyond the kindergartens of Oedipus? (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 67) Tony had said that he would have to do it himself (King 2013: 468)

Darkness alternates with blinding light as the walls of a maze flicker by Danny Torrance, a small boy running for his life. His monstrous father, Jack, the maze’s minotaur, lopes after him through the snow-covered alleyways, waving his axe and bellowing. Suddenly, Danny stops running and starts to move with slow deliberation. His extrasensory ability to ‘shine’, which enables him to perceive the traces of past and future events, makes him change the direction of his footprints in the snow. This short sequence near the end of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) serves as what Deleuze calls a ‘diagrammatic component’, a recurring image which acts as a map or diagram to condense the affects, percepts and concepts of the film (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 122). I will contend that both Danny’s entrapment by his domineering father and his psychic ability to ‘shine’ past and future link him to the Gothic tradition, both in his victimisation and in his ability to reimagine the world. The blue-tinged dazzle as spotlights glance off snow renders the maze too bright to see the paths clearly. Kubrick’s expressive use of lighting makes the Overlook hotel itself shine in ways congenial to Jack’s own ‘visions’ and the quality of light is crucial to our encounter with the film. The multivalent operations of light are also fundamental to Deleuze’s wider philosophy of images moving in time. Encompassing physics and metaphysics, and including thought, memory and intuition, this image-based approach has special relevance to his film-philosophy. Deleuze aligns the metaphysics of Gothic cinema with the ‘infinite forces of light and darkness’ and demonstrates the ‘intensive movement’ of their combat in F. W. Murnau’s Expressionist Gothic Nosferatu (1922),

90  Anna Powell when ‘the movement-image and the light-image are two facets of the same appearing’ (1992: 49). Forces in combat across Kubrick’s film are rival ‘shines’, internal and external. The customary darkness of the Gothic mode is sidelined as the ubiquitous light of the Overlook absorbs all evil forces, including Jack’s malevolence, into itself. Despite being dazzled and drained by this vampiric light, Danny’s stronger ‘shining’ will enable him to ‘see’, to map and traverse pathways through and beyond the labyrinth. For Deleuze, affective cartography is vital to early psychic development in children, who make maps of their own ‘dynamic trajectories’ as they explore milieus (1998: 61). The Deleuzian Gothic child thus becomes, following Anna Hickey-Moody’s suggestive figure, a ‘vector of affect: an activator of change’ (2013: 273). My critical cartography in this chapter will trace Danny’s movements across the affective terrain of a film that sits generically astride the independent art-house/popular Gothic divide. The Shining presents the mise en scène of a typically Gothic haunted mansion with a forbidden Bluebeard’s room, indelible traces of murder, resident spectres and vulnerable children. Danny, a psychic child with an uncanny double, is the central protagonist, haunted by the ghostly Grady girls who were hacked to death by their psychotic father. Danny’s own deranged father, Jack, reprieves this historical evil, imprisoning his wife and son and lusting to kill them. Yet, gravitating against such generic tropes, this formally experimental film deploys Deleuze’s undecidable oneirosign or dream-image ‘where movement of world replaces action’, and the recollection-image or mnemosign, ‘a virtual image which enters into a relationship with the actual image and extends it’ (1989: 335). The trope of shining operates on several levels. Everything in the visual field looks hyper-real and Kubrick’s expressionistic mise en scène is lit to uncanny perfection, including the larder’s harsh fluorescent white and the overripe yellows of the gold room associated with Jack’s malevolent ‘shining’. The over-bright lighting lends a virtual quality to what is actual. Indeed, Danny’s inner ability to shine, which ‘sees pictures’ of terrifying things not ‘there’, renders the actual and virtual undecidable and implies that certain events are mental or supernatural rather than ‘real’ in nature. The liminality of Danny’s visions recalls Deleuze’s child seer of Italian Neo-Realism and New Wave film, characterised by David Martin-Jones as ‘formed in a two way sensory relationship with the pure optical situation’ but unable to interact with it (2011: 73). When the sensory motor function is suspended, sound and vision shift affective gear into ‘something intolerable and unbearable’ (Deleuze 1989: 3). Generic

Pathways through the Labyrinth  91 paradigms give this a specifically Gothic inflection. An early example occurs when a close-up of Danny is introduced, showing him apparently talking to himself in the bathroom mirror, but actually he is in deep conversation with his arguably ‘imaginary friend’, the more mature and knowing ‘Tony’. The camera tracks past the actual boy to his virtual mirror-image as Tony ‘shows him things’ that are not physically present. Premonitory flash-frames of the murdered Grady girls cue in a darkened corridor where lift doors release an intolerably crimson torrent of blood that floods the screen and makes Danny black out. Gothic horror and Deleuze’s philosophy of affirmation might seem incompatible realms, but, as The Shining indicates, their force-fields overlap. The Cinema books offer conceptual tools to explore Danny’s subjective and objective experience. Though Deleuze positions Kubrick’s ‘brain-as-screen’ within the time-image, my mapping of Danny’s progress also draws on the movement-image. Perception- and affectionimages as well as opsigns (visual images), sonsigns (sonic images) and the child seer point towards new perspectives on the Deleuzian child. The Shining’s horror is dominated by opsigns and sonsigns. The child seer is ‘affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing’ in the ambient world (Deleuze 1989: 3). Five-year-old Danny is forcibly removed from home, school and friends to the mountainous isolation of the Overlook, where terrifying psychic forces entrap him further. This cutting-off of outside stimuli, emotional development and circumstantial change make the Gothic child more vulnerable to psychic assault. Deleuze and Guattari describe Freud’s analysand Little Hans as a Gothic prisoner ‘allowed to live and speak, but only after every outlet has been obstructed’ (1988: 14). One horror for the imprisoned child, this chapter asserts, lies in his or her inability to live other than within the trajectory of psychoanalysis.

The Gothic Child in Movement and Time The machinic ‘eye of the camera’ comes equipped with an inhuman shining of its own that extends the range of human perception. In The Movement-Image, Deleuze evokes the generative power of ‘unicentred, subjective perception’ which, located in the human ‘centre of indetermination’ by point-of-view camera set-ups, becomes a perceptionimage linked to an action-image (1992: 64). Yet, this image remains the semi-subjective ‘anonymous viewpoint’ of an unidentified character with ‘no equivalent in natural perception’ (Deleuze 1992: 72). In The Shining, however, the linkage of perception and action is undermined

92  Anna Powell by the imbrication of both with affection-images. Deleuze explains, after Bergson, that affection ‘surges’ in the temporal interval between ‘a troubling perception and a hesitant action’, being ‘the way the subject perceives, experiences or feels itself from inside’ (1992: 65). When external movements are absorbed and refracted, unextended motion becomes affect, so subject and object coexist as a ‘pure quality’ (Deleuze 1992: 66). Affection-images express what Bergson calls a ‘motor tendency on a sensible nerve’, which Deleuze glosses as ‘a motor effort on a mobilised receptive plate’, so affect is intensive, not extensive, movement on the spot, as seen in a close-up facial expression, for example (1992: 72). Intensive qualities of mise en scène engage in affective combat when the hotel’s cool electric omnipresence is cut into by the vibrant colours of children in Danny’s vivid red sweatshirts and the sky-blue dresses of the Gradys. Deleuze extends his study of affect into time-image films emerging after World War II where the sign is not action dependent but rather expresses ‘subjective images, memories of childhood, sound and visual dreams’ (1989: 6). Prominent among such images is the opsign, ‘which breaks the sensory-motor schema and where the seen is not extended into action’ (Deleuze 1989: 335). Its perspective ranges from ‘knowing subjectivism’ to ‘critical objectivism’ (Deleuze 1989: 6). Though rooted in Gothic plot conventions, The Shining deploys time-images to undermine epistemological knowledge as ‘optical situation or visual description replaces the motor action [via a] principle of indeterminability, of indiscernibility’ (Deleuze 1989: 7). In this simulacral terrain, brain and world are overlaid as the shining ensures that ‘we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask’ (Deleuze 1989: 7). Danny’s inevitable entrance into the terrifying ‘forbidden room’, Suite 237, is made on foot. An extreme close-up shows his hands guiding toy trucks along the black ‘roads’ formed by the interlocked abstract patterns of the carpet. In one of the film’s images of stymied motion, the camera-eye tracks out to a high angle, revealing the boy trapped in the overwhelming black and orange maze of the overall design. When a ball rolls inexplicably into frame, Danny seeks his hidden playmate. The door of 237 gapes ajar as Danny glides in, his small, hesitant steps unnervingly ‘possessed’ by the inexorable camera’s own smooth track towards the open door, then pausing on a close-up of the boy’s wide-eyed terror. The generic cut-away here intensifies desire and dread to look within, but despite the bright glare, Danny’s encounter with

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Figure 5.1  Danny’s unbearable horror at the ‘pure optical and sound situation’ in 237.

horror remains imperceptible. We follow him through the door, but no further. The subsequent bruises seen on his neck fail to clarify what happened inside. Exact revelation is withheld and complicated by proxy later, when a ‘possessed’ Danny intuitively ‘shines’, fantasises, or even watches, scenes of Jack’s ambivalent erotic encounter with the woman in 237, presented with intercut reaction-shots of the child’s horrified

94  Anna Powell face. Uncanny opsigns, revealed by light-images, have produced that autonomous ‘movement of world’ which animates the Overlook and which, though virtual, induces actual horror (Deleuze 1989: 59). The Deleuzian child can be illuminated further by using Gothicinflected critique to augment this film-philosophical study of The Shining via literary text and historical context.

The Gothic Child: Critical Approaches Margarita Georgieva’s substantial history of the child in Gothic literature links Kubrick’s The Shining to an early novel, Wilhelmina Johnson’s The Ranger of the Tomb (1830), featuring twins, via the novel’s ‘bloody scene of death, the heap of flesh, the distracted mother [where] the father is the guilty madman who perpetrates atrocities on mother and child in an enclosed space initially intended to serve as a home’ (2013: 171). She aligns those scenarios with Kubrick’s cinematography, which presents ‘bloody corpses of twin girls with similar high-angle focus, as if seen through the eye of the murderer or of a helpless witness’, and argues that the high-angle observation shots in Kubrick are ‘the heritage of the gothic novel’ (Georgieva 2013: 171). Although Georgieva’s highangle comparison fits her broader reading of the Gothic child as victim, other shots of the dead girls in the film are filmed straight on, from a Danny-level set-up, which, in terms of a reading based on character and plot, might both equalise the children’s vulnerability and make parallels between Jack’s and Danny’s point-of-view to suggest they share murderous intent. Yet Kubrick’s cinematography works to undermine such ­characterand plot-based analysis in the ways it presents the mise en scène. The monstrous camera-eye is that of neither a human murderer nor a witness. The children are, rather, victimised by the camera’s own anomalies: impossibly wide and high angles, supernaturally long shots, expressionistic lighting and sublime inflation of space. The inhuman nature of this camera-eye is displayed as the tiny Torrance family car ascends a Colorado mountain pass. The magisterial bird’s-eye swoops down, melding into a cramped three-shot that emphasises Danny’s vulnerability in the car interior, dark in contrast to the bright glare of snow outside. Angle, composition and framing present the claustrophobic intimacy of a nuclear family apart from the world. Danny is dependently positioned between parents, leaning forward from the back seat. Jack at the wheel dominates the foreground with his smug, condescending grin, as he dominates the dialogue with sarcasm. The profound sense of

Pathways through the Labyrinth  95 unease established in the sublime location of the title sequence is condensed into small form to intensify the threat. Neither set-up provides a subjective point-of-view, being ‘shone’ by the extra-human perception of the camera itself. Georgieva also aligns Kubrick’s maze to The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey (Carver 1797) via the child’s struggles ‘within a maze-like home’, and she compares Danny’s traumatic imprisonment with that of Laura, the novel’s heroine (2013: 171). Crucially for my own discussion of Danny’s creative imagination, Georgieva asserts the child’s unique capacity to reimagine the Gothic space as ‘inhabited, rediscovered and rebuilt’, becoming ‘whatever the child wants it to be’ (2013: 172). She argues that the most stable element in the Gothic world is ‘the child who has come to resist, fight, and fill that space with projections, memories and hopes’, positioning the Gothic child as a central, generative trope from the mode’s outset (Georgieva 2013: 172). Originating in Stephen King’s horror novel (1983), Kubrick’s Danny both reinforces and reshapes the Gothic literary tradition. Although sharing the vulnerability, victimisation and psychic abilities of the Gothic child, Kubrick’s Danny, via his expressive performance of the seer function, extends the generic parameters of the Gothic world by enabling philosophical reflection as well as terror and horror. Danny combines affects, percepts and concepts in his exploration of temporal and spatial anomalies as well as his expression of contemporary power relations. Georgieva’s historical approach to the Gothic child as well as Deleuze’s film-philosophy may be usefully extended by a culturalism which locates The Shining within its sociocultural milieu. Roger Luckhurst’s succinct study aligns Danny and the twins with the ‘uncanny, psychic children’ of its contemporary horrors like The Exorcist (Blatty 1972), The Brood (Cronenberg 1979), Scanners (Cronenberg 1981) and Poltergeist (Hooper 1982) (Luckhurst 2015: 30). The association of extrasensory powers with persecuted children is also developed in science fiction films like Village of the Damned (Rilla 1960), which suggested that ‘trauma inflicted children with a psychical wound that could bleed into supernatural powers’ (Luckhurst 2015: 33). Often, 1970s domestic horror features the ambivalent child as ‘apparently innocent victim [becoming] demonic destroyer’ (Luckhurst 2015: 32). Though the Overlook is geographically isolated, Danny’s characteristics as a Gothic child are clearly marked by broader generic tendencies in American cinema as the trope of the monstrous child emerged as a focus for contemporary social and ideological concerns centring on the American family unit.

96  Anna Powell Luckhurst contextualises The Shining in the social upheaval of 1960s and 1970s USA with its destabilised family unit and high divorce rate, which conservatives blamed on permissive parenting and the childcentred approach of Dr Benjamin Spock’s manuals (2015: 33). The medicalisation of child behaviour flourished at the time and Ritalin was administered to manage ‘attention deficit’ in children to achieve their acquiescence to the politics of the nuclear family. Luckhurst Gothicises baby-boomer parents, who, like Jack, are ‘stricken with terror, before this appalling progeny’ (2015: 29), that is, children who refuse to conform. The film’s doctor regards ‘Tony’ as a symptom of ‘dissociation from family abuse’ (Luckhurst 2015: 37), the separation of mental processes into multiple personalities as a defence mechanism against his father’s pathological rages. Her diagnosis might also be marked by the anti-psychiatry of R. D. Laing and David Cooper, who accused the bourgeois family of ‘generating rage, alienation and inauthentic living’ by demanding ‘passive submission to invasion by others’, a view which also influenced Guattari and Deleuze (Luckhurst 2015: 40). As a ‘psychic child’, Danny uses ‘magical thinking’ to evade a ‘punitive and psychotic patriarchal order’ and he is thus a product of both genre and context (Luckhurst 2015: 33). In their research for the film, Kubrick and his co-scriptwriter Diane Johnson read Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ with its castrating father figure. Luckhurst also suggests that Bruno Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress (1967), to which we return later, may shape the ‘autistic’ depiction of Danny, with his ‘traumatised vacancy and his wild talent’ produced by Wendy’s weakness and Jack’s resentment (2015: 51). In his own Freud-inflected reading, Luckhurst contends that Danny’s intersubjective states, with their ‘uncanny repetition and the dissolution of boundaries’, are produced by extreme trauma, manifest in a point-of-view torn from a ‘secure ground of identity’ (2015: 65). He suggests an Oedipal function for the interior maze. If 237 is the mother’s uncanny body, then its horror stems from ‘inappropriate female desire, a perversion of the maternal figure’ (Luckhurst 2015: 65). Though physically and psychically damaged by his experiences, Danny nevertheless emerges from the ordeal. When he also escapes from the maze outside, Luckhurst suggests that he disrupts Jack’s Oedipal fantasy to fulfil his own, reunited with Wendy as ‘a full being again’ (Luckhurst 2015: 85). Luckhurst’s psychoanalytical warp with regard to Kubrick’s The Shining also underlies the weft of Steven Bruhm’s study of child-rearing anxieties in modern Gothic, shaped by cultural historicism with an innovative queer take. Bruhm emphasises the ‘overtly Freudian recognition

Pathways through the Labyrinth  97 of the child’s sexual aggressions, psychological tensions, and forbidden desires’ (2017). In contrast to Georgieva’s victimised children, Bruhm, however, contends that ‘in our Freudian world, the spectre of childhood violence and sexuality emanates from the child itself’ (2006: 99) whose ‘evil essence precedes existence’ (2006: 102). Bruhm also considers the socio-historical determinants of this child figure. Conservative commentators claimed that from the 1950s onwards, American children were ‘brainwashed by communism, atheism, feminism and homosexualism after an initial spoiling’ by the ‘momism’ in the bond between Wendy and Danny, resented by Jack (Bruhm 2006: 100). Bruhm’s sinister and ‘knowing’ Gothic child-monster threatens patriarchal power (2006: 103). Adapting Freud, he reads this evil child as a ‘primal murderer’ seeking to usurp adult authority (2006: 99). Bruhm’s main focus is King’s psychoanalytically inflected Jack, who arguably directs ‘murderous lust’ not at his family but at his youthful self, unable to ‘appease the harsh masculinist demands of his own father’ (2006: 108). For Bruhm, to outmanoeuvre his imagined assailant, the father desires a return to ‘immaturity, to be psychologically infantilised’ by indulging his ‘child within’ (2006: 108). In Kubrick’s film, Jack enacts regression, cowering under the table after the prescient ‘nightmare’ in which he ‘shines’ Wendy and Danny’s murder and perhaps projects Mr Grady’s ghost to spur on his own desire. Wendy comforts Jack before a traumatised and injured Danny claims her attention. When she accuses her husband of the bruises, a close-up shows his face contorted in a jealous scowl. King’s Jack, himself an abused son in the novel, is gripped by repetition-compulsion, breaking his son’s arm and assaulting an attractive male student. Bruhm’s queer-psychoanalytic perspective aligns Jack’s repressed homoerotic and paedophiliac desire with narcissism. He contends that, despite adoring ‘our child within’, we must kill it for the ‘horrifying eros’ it generates in us, ‘paedophiliac, homophiliac – yet intuitive and inexorable’ (Bruhm 2006: 109). For Bruhm, the Gothic child as victim/monster is produced by adult male fantasies of the ‘inner child’ (2006: 111). Both Bruhm and Georgieva rework the ‘phantasmatic slaughter house’ of the bourgeois ‘family romance’ in Gothic literature (Bruhm 2016: 98). Whilst valuing their critical and historical insights, I turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s maps and moving images to illuminate Danny’s repudiation of the patriarchal order in the film. As Hickey-Moody argues, the Deleuzian child has power to destratify bourgeois individualism via its ‘pack mentality [and] tendency towards disaggregation of the family’ (2013: 281). Deleuze and Guattari’s child figures engage in the tentative

98  Anna Powell and erratic motion of ‘a flow of walking with pauses, straggling, and forward rushes’ (1988: 23). I focus on the ebb and flow of Danny’s desire, its detours and persistence in shining through dead ends and false turnings, in order to trace his refusal of victimhood and the growth of his autonomy.

Towards a Dynamic Cartography Rather than an ‘archaeological’ unearthing of Oedipal origins, Deleuze and Guattari’s unconscious cartography maps a psychic ‘mobilisation whose objects take flight rather than remaining buried’ (1988: 63). This mobilisation occurs as affective processes that transform the body into ‘an intensive map’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 64). Such maps are less concerned with desire’s spatial extension than with its unfolding, like Danny’s shining, on the plane of affect. Deleuze and Guattari rework psychoanalytical child case studies by comparing tracing and mapping. For them, tracings are conservative, repeating existing patterns without progress, whereas maps unfold the creative production of the new. The affective map of Freud’s Little Hans extends beyond the family home into the city streets. Here, Hans’s supposedly ‘negligible’ geographical foray leads to a crucial rhizomatic encounter with ‘becoming-horse’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 65). Freud, however, limits this attempt at cartographical ‘intervention’ by back-projecting the boy’s desire ‘onto the family photo’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 61). Freud’s analysis of Hans ‘kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP’ and trapped him in a kind of Gothic prison by ‘blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 14). Melanie Klein likewise made tracings of Little Richard’s ‘geopolitical maps’, but his desire sought more creative egress by making her part-objects productive in their own right (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 44) and thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, therapists need to ‘plug the tracings back into the map’ to enable children’s becomings (1988: 14). Unlike a Freudian ‘tracing’ of Danny’s circuits around the ‘maternal body’ of Room 237, a Deleuzian map focuses on how the child’s concentric pathways build up affective intensity. Danny’s cinematic terrain, as both agent and object of the shining, is potentised by opsigns and sonsigns. In his second circuit of the hotel on his tricycle, an over-theshoulder shot focuses on the gleaming door of 237. The reverse shot is an affection-image close-up of his face, wide eyes staring out-offrame, and his fearful panting. As Danny dismounts, a long take of him

Pathways through the Labyrinth  99 checking the corridor before trying the locked door increases suspense. Suddenly ‘seeing’ the Grady twins in a warning flash-frame, he remounts and pedals away. Danny’s third circuit, through a corridor with blueflowered wallpaper, increases affective terror for character and viewer as he shines the twins again, this time blocking his exit and demanding attention. Three sets of flash-frames then reverse time to display their freshly hacked-up bodies as Danny shines the spectral imprint of trauma and is warned against temporal repetition. Danny’s shining of ‘imaginary friends’ like the twins and Tony can be elucidated further by work on autism.

Mapping Autism: Bettelheim, Lewin, Deligny Stephen King’s Dr Edmonds regards the pop-psychological diagnosis of ‘imaginary friends’ as a reductive ‘one-sentence explanation [for] the whole range of such phenomena’ as these psychic projections, common in children (2013: 163). According to Lacan’s mirror-stage, which Danny appears stuck in, Tony would be misrecognised as a split-off and idealised part of himself (Lacan 2006). The doctor’s own diagnosis of Danny ranges from autism to a ‘fully-fledged psychosis’ (King 2013: 164). King’s Gothic agenda, however, foregrounds the authenticity of Danny’s extrasensory perception (ESP). Whilst relishing the cinematic potential of Jack’s ‘madness’, Kubrick leaves Danny’s status as autistic or possessed undecided and the film’s impact is stronger for this uncertainty. From a Deleuzian angle, Danny’s radical introspections through his supersensory experiences would key in his function as a child seer. Deleuze’s approach to affective autism focuses on children’s spatial negotiation, which involves a creative mapping of space by mobilising affective forces in acting them out. Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress influenced Anti-Oedipus, written before the child psychologist was discredited as a ‘psychotic savant’ (Pollak 1997). Deleuzian desiringmachines develop Bettelheim’s case study of Little Joey, who, demanding connection to electrical ‘machinery’, needed ‘to plug himself in, before he could function’ (Bettelheim 1967: 236). Despite Bettelheim’s Oedipal bias, Joey’s assemblages evince autonomous productivity. Rather than endorsing Bettelheim’s diagnosis of arrested development as ‘impotent rage’ and repressed desire (1967: 19), Deleuze and Guattari locate an intensive machinic process in the boy’s successive ‘paranoiac machines, miraculating machines, and celibate machines’ (1984: 37). Danny’s own enforced stasis and impotent ‘grounding’ is visually cued

100  Anna Powell in by his ‘Flyers’ baseball jacket and his Apollo 11 sweater. His game of darts, itself a repetitive effort to move in a confined space, is stymied by a vision of the twins stuck in a time-loop which they both warn him against and also want him to share. Bettelheim observes the autistic induction of spatial stasis by rotating on the spot, repeatedly turning in ‘the smallest and worst of all possible worlds. But at least it rotates around them, it is their own. Moving beyond it, even on a tricycle, is to court destruction’ (1967: 233). Danny’s own tricycle forays enter what Bettelheim regards as the vortex of an ‘extreme situation, entirely without hope’ (1967: 68). Danny does not sing, but his tricycle as machinic adjunct repeats a kind of signature ‘tune’ as he maps out his terrain. This repetitive sonsign alternates the amplified rumble of wheels and their muffling on the thick carpet. Danny’s territorial refrain is a brave prophylactic to defy encroaching threat. Intercut with his father’s rival refrain, the aggressive baseball thwack, its repetitive reverberation intensifies the threat of impending violence. Bettelheim claims that autistic children use all their energy for protection rather than ‘building personality’ (1967: 73). As evidence of this, he cites them ‘looking vaguely into the distance without seeming to see, and their concentration of things close at hand where there is nothing to see but their own twiddling fingers’ (1967: 75). Danny likewise often looks ‘elsewhere’, as in the long-held, unblinking gaze of visions or staring intently at ‘Tony’ via his wiggling index finger, in each case shining another plane of reality. Despite Bettelheim’s Freudian limitations, Deleuze adapts some of his case-study material into conceptual figures useful to explore the autistic operations of affect, whether enacted extensively or experienced intensively. His work on the intensive movement of the cinematic close-up is apposite to Kubrick’s framing of Danny’s face. Kubrick’s close-ups often position Danny’s expressive eyes at centre-frame, emphasising them by his heavy fringe and the relative stasis of other facial features. For Deleuze, the facial close-up is ‘both the face and its effacement’ (1992: 100). It defamiliarises the face, ‘abstracts it from all spatio-temporal coordinates’, ‘raises it to the state of Entity’ and reduces subjective identity (Deleuze 1992: 96). He identifies two types of close-ups, intensive (power) and reflective (quality), though affects are often variably ‘Dividual’, meaning their data can be considered quantitatively (Deleuze 1992: 105). Danny’s face shifts between these poles, depending on his reactive or introspective mode. Joey’s ‘Connecticut papoose’, a cathected part-object the boy relied on to regulate the flow of energy by switching himself on and off,

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Figure 5.2  Danny looks elsewhere.

is a suggestive figure of affect for Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 37). Joey later produces a more developed ‘imaginary companion’ called Valvus, ‘a boy “just like me”’ with valve-like properties, acting as an ‘externalised structure for an inner personality’ (Bettelheim 1967: 315). For Bettelheim, Joey’s progress was marked by increasingly autonomous avatars until he ‘gave birth to himself from an egg’ and was cured ‘all by himself’ in a fantasy game of egoic rebirth enabling him to meet life ‘in a straightforward direct encounter’ (1967: 339). Bettelheim’s autistic ‘theatre’ of the unconscious, with its extended anal prelude, is ultimately a Freudian tracing and not a map of desire. Deleuze’s cartography concentrates instead on the child’s affective field made of ‘qualities, substances, powers, and events’ merging subject with object and giving primacy to ‘places or functions that exist independent of milieus’ (1998: 61). Deleuze displaces Freud’s parental coordinates on to the child’s actual environment, where ‘parents as persons simply play the role of openers or closers of doors, guardians of thresholds, connectors or disconnectors of zones’ (1998: 62). Parents are thus relegated to components in a broader milieu as children ‘pass through its [the

102  Anna Powell milieu’s] qualities and powers and make a map of them’ (Deleuze 1998: 62). Deleuze also draws on Kurt Lewin’s idea of the ‘hodological spaces’ mapped by autistic children, with their barriers and detours, to develop the cartography of becoming-child (Lewin 1938). Lewin considers that the Euclidean or Riemannian space used to measure distance is inadequate for psychological mapping. He contends instead that psychic ‘space’ comprises affective valences and vectors. Both qualitative and quantitative, it includes direction as well as distance. Lewin’s study, with its map-like diagrams, conceptualises the ‘dynamic relation between psychological forces, valences, and tension’ and the ‘“mechanics” of locomotion’ (1938: 210). Social, cognitive and ‘dynamical’ factors vary and paths are situation-dependent via positive and negative forces like food or an obstruction (1938: 3). His interest also lies in the ‘power field’ of interpersonal influences (1938: 104). Lewin’s ‘total life-space’ maps include subjectivity and environment (1938: 71). Hodological forces are ‘dynamical constructs’ of psychological processes (1938: 71). These positive and negative valences of affect feed into Deleuze’s mobile maps of desire used to explore the child’s affective negotiation of life-space. Lewin studied a rat’s negotiation of valences in a maze of cognitively undetermined spaces, concluding that knowledge leads to directional changes (1938: 60). Kubrick presents a complex assemblage of actual, virtual and diagrammatic mazes to express physical and psychic negotiation of Gothic entrapment. When the camera-eye ‘leads’ Danny and Wendy into the garden maze, it pauses in a close-up of the entrance map as if to mock its inadequacy as a mere tracing. Inside the maze, although hedges open on to blue sky, their height and layout repeats the hotel’s claustrophobic corridors. A jump cut then traps mother and son in the double bind of Jack’s surveillance. Inside the Overlook, Jack has uncanny prescience of them as miniature figures moving within a model of the garden maze. Although Danny holds Wendy’s hand, he needs neither directional guidance nor emotional support. His intuitive, affective knowledge of complex pathways and traps will equip him to escape imprisonment and death. Deleuze’s conceptualisation of maps is connected, via Guattari, to the rhizomatic praxis of the anti-psychiatry movement. Fernand Deligny’s communal experiment in Cévennes with young autistic people was an additional inspiration for Deleuze and Guattari’s cartographic thinking (Deleuze 1998: 61). Deligny made sketches and shot footage of his residents’ pathways or lignes d’erre (Deligny 2015), later made into films, Le moindre geste (1971) and Ce gamin, là (1975). Deligny’s maps of

Pathways through the Labyrinth  103 ‘wandering lines, loops, corrections, and turnings back – all their singularities’ are analogous to Danny’s lines of flight, both spatial and psychic (Deleuze 1998: 61). Jack’s delusional omniscience cannot predict the moves Danny is capable of in all their difference and repetition.

Cartographies of Difference and Repetition The Shining is redolent with repetition in plot, themes and style. The process of shining itself, presented expressively by the camera-eye and lighting and centred in Danny as seer with ESP, is experienced differently by Jack, Halloran and, to a limited degree, Wendy. Jack’s paranoid delusions and the Overlook’s light palette are, as we have seen, forces in combat with Danny’s own multivalent shining. Deleuze’s study of difference and repetition, which considers the operations of similarity and equivalence, includes concepts with Gothic resonance (2014: 2). For Deleuze, exact repetition is unnatural, even ‘miraculous’ (2014: 3). Repetition concerns ‘reflections, echoes, mirrors and souls’ beyond resemblance or equivalence, and he suggests that ‘it is no more possible to exchange one’s soul than it is to substitute real twins for one another’ (Deleuze 2014: 19). Deleuze’s Gothicism here stems from his discussion of Freud, for whom thanatos, the death instinct, acts as an ‘originary principle for repetition’ (2014: 19), producing a ‘theatre’ of terror using masked repetition via the ‘condensation, displacement, dramatisation’ of dreams and symptoms (2014: 20). For Deleuze, the psychoanalytical view of phantasy, ‘immersed in the death instinct, where everything is already masked and disguised’, emerged after Freud abandoned the parental seduction hypothesis of ‘real childhood events, which would have played the part of ultimate disguised terms’ (Deleuze 2014: 21). The ‘more theatrical and dramatic operation’ of psychoanalytical transference extends the ambiguous, Gothic-inflected ‘magic’ of repetition so that, ‘if repetition makes us ill, it also heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us, testifying in both cases to its “demonic” power’ (Deleuze 2014: 22). The Grady ghosts exemplify theatrical Oedipal repetition. Only Danny ever sees the girls, at times of extreme stress. They lack autonomy, being trapped in the Overlook’s repetition-compulsion. Aged eight and ten in manager Ullman’s account, they appear before Danny as twins, with identical hairstyles and dresses. This repetition might be regarded as Danny’s autistic production of more imaginary friends. Further insight into uncanny Gothic twins is, however, offered by Deleuze’s contention that repetitions ‘act without intermediary upon the spirit’ and link

104  Anna Powell to pre-personal affects, ‘with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters – the whole apparatus of repetition as a “terrible power”’ (2014: 12). Exact repetition produces uncanny singularities because, although repetitions may be ‘“represented” as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, they remain essentially different in kind’ (Deleuze 2014: 2). In this view, the ‘paradox’ of twins or doubles is ‘a “discrete extension” . . . [of] a pullulation of individuals absolutely identical in respect of their concept, and participating in the same singularity in existence’ (Deleuze 2014: 15). Kubrick’s twins are not such ‘true’ repetitions but they express the film’s play of repetitive series with singular difference. Danny’s trajectory moves across a psychic landscape where the polarised forces of actual and virtual intersect with those of difference and repetition. Deleuze’s tetravalent ‘map’ also relates the difference between self-preservative and sexual drives to the dual series of the actual/virtual. For Deleuze, infantile movement around the centres of the real and virtual is not ‘circular or egocentric but elliptical’, though a kind of ego can form within ‘a crossing, a twist, a helix or a figure 8’ (2014: 128). The actual and the virtual also operate their own dynamic of difference and repetition. Deleuze’s examples are phenomena often given Gothic treatment, left-handedness and mirror-writing, the latter being uncannily displayed in Danny’s magical use of ‘Redrum’ (Deleuze 2014: 128). After his visit to 237, the traumatised child sinks into catatonia. The ‘demonic’ ‘Tony’ gains ascendancy, possessing Danny’s voice and movements. The repeated visions of the bloody lift use further repetition to accelerate terror. Through ‘Tony’, Danny precognitively ‘sees’ possible futures and pasts, his physical eyes wide open but not seeing his immediate surroundings. Acting as Danny’s defence mechanism, ‘Tony’ tells Wendy that Danny ‘can’t wake’ and repeats a mantra-like ‘Redrum’ to warn her against Jack’s intent. Furthermore, ‘Tony’ makes Danny ‘shine’ the forthcoming axe attack, prepare defence with a large kitchen knife and write the reverse mirror-writing of ‘Redrum’ with lipstick on the bedroom door – images suggesting the potential violence of the possessed child himself. Dustin Freeley launches his discussion of repetition in The Shining (2015) with Deleuze’s idea of monstrosity as ‘the pure unformed’ (Deleuze 1990: 123) which, as Markus Bohlmann and Sean Moreland observe, ‘enlarges the definition of the monstrous’ by making it generative (2015: 18). Freeley exemplifies this via the Gothic children of Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski 1968) and Eraserhead (Lynch 1977), whose partially glimpsed bodies typify Deleuzian monstrosity by ‘brutally remonstrating against

Pathways through the Labyrinth  105

Figure 5.3  Tony/Danny shining Jack’s impending attack.

our presumption to know’ (Leventer 2015: 81). Kubrick’s children, ‘neither evil nor innocent’, are potentially monstrous, he argues, because they are ‘capable of, and willing to indulge in violence, sexuality and death’ (Freeley 2015: 161). Freeley’s familial politics use difference and repetition to ‘delink father and son from repeating the same generational programmes’ to enable difference (Bohlmann and Moreland 2015: 22). Finding Danny both familiar and unfamiliar, Jack fears his son’s youthful promise as an uncanny threat that highlights his own failings and mortality (Freeley 2015: 164). Like Bruhm, Freeley notes Jack’s ‘childish and narcissistic’ rejection of his paternal role (2015: 164) and that father and son have an ‘antagonistic homosocial relationship’ (2015: 163). He contends that Danny, rather than Jack, ‘embodies the subliminal definition of socially constructed patriarchy’ and ‘represents financial, familial and (ironically) mental stability’ and thus posits a conservative future via Danny’s endorsement of traits his father lacked (Freeley 2015: 161). After his initial use of Deleuze to introduce his themes, Freeley shifts his critical focus on to Lacan to elucidate Danny’s ‘imitation and repudiation of the phallic order’ (2015: 170) and the linguistic

106  Anna Powell implications of ‘Redrum’ (2015: 167). Freeley asserts that although the boy cannot understand ‘the subliminal aggression that he portends’, his survival ensures his continuing monstrosity as ‘agent in the construction of future cultural and historical anxieties’ (2015: 170). Freeley’s conclusion is ambivalent about Danny’s future. Whilst aware of the difficulties of change, he still hopes that Danny will ‘avoid indoctrination’ into patriarchal norms and ‘write his own future’ (2015: 170). My own consideration of his escape from a mortuary Oedipus also turns to the line of flight as a ‘deterritorialisation that carries away all of the assemblages’ to produce the new (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 89).

Danny’s Cartographic Becomings and Lines of Flight The Shining traces Danny’s attempted flight from a Gothic world of psychotic patriarchs, serial murderers and a vampiric draining of élan vital. He moves through Freudian pathways laid out to trap him into Oedipal repetition and then encounters a more Deleuzian series of becomings, though their rhizomatic potential is twisted by the Gothic milieu. This series begins by rejecting the molar position of ‘man’, then passes through becoming-woman, becoming-girl and becoming-imperceptible. Danny negotiates these options in seeking his own potential to becomemolecular. As a male gendered child he is normatively expected to ‘be a man’ by leaving the maternal dyad, but his psychic prescience reveals that identifying with his ‘bad father’ would mean death. Danny rejects the ambiguous ‘bad mother’, desirable and deadly, in 237 and is also prevented from bonding with the ‘good father’, the protective Halloran, one of Deleuze’s disempowered seers. Having begun becoming-woman with his actual mother Wendy, Danny is offered a kind of becoming-girl as playmate of the spectral Grady twins. The girls’ option is rejected, despite the fascination of their doubling, as they are stuck in the stasis of the past and the compulsion to repeat it. The obstacles Danny tackles, however they damage him, strengthen the force of his shining which, despite its terrifying visions, enables him to make the move from looking to thinking and acting. Discussing children in contemporary Spanish horror cinema, Jessica Balanzategui observes that whilst being ‘liminally imprisoned’ between action and perception, the child seer’s insights exceed ‘homogeneous temporality’ (2015: 228). Child seers ‘disrupt the flow of linear time, a particularly disconcerting act for a being defined according to the future-oriented process of growing up, caught up in the past whilst shaping the flow of the present’ (Balanzategui 2015: 228). For much of the narrative,

Pathways through the Labyrinth  107 Danny does appear to remain such a passive seer stuck at a temporal crossroads. Yet, for Deleuze, ‘self-consciousness in recognition appears as the faculty of the future [or] the function of the new’ (2014: 18). Near the end of the film, Danny will combine shining vision with autonomous agency when he produces himself as a new kind of seer and thus redefines the category of child seer.

Through the Maze to Becoming-Imperceptible At this point, we return to the snowy maze where we left Danny at the start. Despite fearing for his life, Danny’s shining reveals few false turnings and he seems to know the way. Close-ups of his pounding feet emphasise force and agility finally released. The boy’s movements become focused and deliberate as he stops running and starts to think. Danny finds himself at the centre of a quincunx formed by the four poles of difference and repetition, actual and virtual, and is able to manipulate their forces. He stages his escape by walking backwards a short way and making new marks that appear to retrace his steps. Having concealed the direction of his actual tracks with snow, he hides behind a hedge until Jack turns back, misled by the false trail to his death. Wendy’s parallel flight through the Overlook is intercut with a clunky array of Gothic stage machines: ghostly guests, cobwebbed skeletons and an ever-bloody lift. The melodramatic scares of her brief shining contrast with the insight of Danny, who has emerged after his Oedipal ordeal to see his way out of the Gothic world. Lewin’s assertion that decisions alter a force-field’s structure illuminate Danny’s ability to decide ‘for himself’ how to negotiate the maze. Force encounters need and changes the environment ‘either by a cognitive restructuring or by a change of structure through locomotion’ (Lewin 1938: 109). Lewin identifies two types of field restructuring: decision and learning (1938: 160). In learning to run a maze, velocity depends on the drive’s intensity and the type of incentive. Individual ‘intelligence and stubbornness’ are crucial factors in changing relations between force-fields (Lewin 1938: 161). Even a small shift of position within a volatile ‘labile equilibrium’ can lead into a new ‘constellation of forces’ (Lewin 1938: 189). The decision’s velocity is ‘closely related to problems of time and of probability of change’ (Lewin 1938: 189). Although Wendy and Danny are reunited and escape together, what happens next, though inviting speculation, lies beyond the parameters of knowledge, fortunately for the film’s suggestive impact. Danny’s function shifts from seer to agent, moving from perception and affection to

108  Anna Powell action driven by the intuition of his special gift and experiential knowledge. ‘Tony’ has left him and for the first time he thinks for himself by shining in an original and creative way. Danny, becoming a Deleuzian ‘generative child’ (Hickey-Moody 2013: 272), is a force of deterritorialised desire. He gains autonomy via a new cartography when a singular vector emerges to take his path ‘off the map’ of the Gothic to becomeimperceptible. In a sense, he knows the morbid theatre of Oedipus well enough to stage his disappearance in the kind of death drive reworked by Deleuze, with its ‘three paradoxical and complementary requirements: to give repetition an original, positive principle, but also an autonomous disguising power; and finally, to give it an immanent meaning in which terror is closely mingled with the movement of selection and freedom’ (2014: 23). A Gothic child no longer, Danny is ready to exchange the limits of the tracing to see his way forward with a new map of the world.

References Balanzategui, J. (2015), ‘“Insects Trapped in Amber”: The Mutant Child-Seer in Contemporary Spanish Horror Film’, in M.  P.  J. Bohlmann and S. Moreland (eds), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 225–45. Bettelheim, B. (1967), The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, New York: Macmillan. Bettelheim, B. (1977), The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, New York: Vintage Books. Bohlmann, M. P. J. and S. Moreland (2015), ‘Introduction: Holy Terrors and Other Musings on Monstrous-Childness’, in M. P. J. Bohlmann and S. Moreland (eds), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 9–27. Bruhm, S. (2006), ‘Nightmare on Sesame Street: or, The Self-Possessed Child’, Gothic Studies, 8 (2): 98–113. Bruhm, S. (2017), ‘The Gothic Child: Work in Progress’, (last accessed 12 June 2018). Carver, Mrs. [1797] (2006), The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey, Camarillo, CA: Zittaw Press. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. (1992), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. (1998), ‘What Children Say’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, London: Verso, pp. 61–8. Deleuze, G. (2014), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone Press.

Pathways through the Labyrinth  109 Deleuze G. and C. Parnet (2002), ‘Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse’, in Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone Press, pp. 77–133. Deligny, F. (2015), The Arachnean and Other Texts, trans. D. S. Burk and C. Porter, Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. Freeley, D. (2015), ‘The Monstrous Child: Replacement and Repetition in The Shining’, in M. P. J. Bohlmann and S. Moreland (eds), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 160–73. Georgieva, M. (2013), The Gothic Child, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hickey-Moody, A. C. (2013), ‘Deleuze’s Children’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45 (3): 272–86. Johnson, W. [1830] 1847, The Ranger of the Tomb, or, The Gypsy’s Prophesy: A Romance, London: E. Lloyd. King, S. (2013), The Shining, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Lacan, J. (2006), ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits, trans. B. Fink, New York and London: W. W. Norton, pp. 75–82. Leventer, Sarah (2015), ‘“My Hideous Cinematic Progeny”: Rosemary’s Baby, Eraserhead and Frankenstein’, in M.  P.  J. Bohlmann and S. Moreland (eds), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 79–95. Lewin, K. (1938), The Conceptual Representation and the Measurement of Psychological Forces, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Luckhurst, R. (2015), The Shining, London: Palgrave/BFI. Martin-Jones, D. (2011), Deleuze and World Cinemas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pollak, R. (1997), The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, New York: Touchstone.

Films The Brood (1979), D. Cronenberg. Ce gamin, là (1976), F. Deligny and R. Victor; (last accessed 12 June 2018). Eraserhead (1977), D. Lynch. The Exorcist (1972), P. Blatty. Le moindre geste (1971), F. Deligny; (last accessed 12 June 2018). Nosferatu (1922), F. W. Murnau. Poltergeist (1982), T. Hooper. Rosemary’s Baby (1968), R. Polanski. Scanners (1981), D. Cronenberg. The Shining (1980), S. Kubrick. Village of the Damned (1960), W. Rilla.

Chapter 6

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’: Transgender Children and the Breach in the Oedipal Gender Assemblage Mat Fournier

Transgender children have become in less than a decade a much-discussed phenomenon, as well as the source of widespread anxiety. In Northern America and Western Europe, a considerable amount of literature is produced on a monthly basis, in forms of informative articles, videos and movie documentaries, ranging from community-based activism to mainstream voyeurism, from biopics to political statements. These productions might be autobiographical, psychological, medical, poetic, fictional, religious, journalistic, and so on; they might be addressed to parents, to children, to educators, to therapists; but mostly they seem to address a larger population. Transgender children, real or fictional, are branded as everybody’s concern. Perceived by some as a contaminating phenomenon able to disrupt the entire educating system, transgender children have become a symbol, be it the symbol of a just cause or the symbol of all that is evil, be it a cause for concern, worries, tears or outrage. A commentary published in July 2017 by the Daily Signal, an American online news publication dedicated to offering ‘a trusted alternative to biased mainstream media’, claims: ‘But transgender ideology is not just infecting our laws. It is intruding into the life of the most innocent among us – children – and with the apparent growing support of the professional medical community’ (Cretella 2017b). Two words, here, are particularly significant: ‘infecting’ and ‘innocent’. The author of the commentary, Michelle Cretella, the President of the American College of Pediatricians, uses a well-known metaphor: moral decadence is considered as a sickness attacking the social body. The social apparatus of laws has already been destroyed by the so-called ‘ideology’, and a growing group of corrupted professionals is about to inject the metaphorical disease into the real bodies of innocent children. Tacit here is the implication that the innocence of children is at least as

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’  111 important as their bodies. Following Cretella’s rhetorical construction, if ideology has infected the social body, leaving the door open for real bodies (that is, those of the evil doctors) to enter the lives of real children and introduce the evil germs into their bodies, then the next step in this epidemic logic is that the children themselves will become the contaminating agents. This anxiety surrounding transgender children is caught in a double bind, as old as Cretella’s sickness-decadence metaphor. On the one hand, children represent an investment in the future, and transgender children seem to threaten their own reproductive future. By straying away from their own sex, they seem to refuse the natural laws that allow their future selves to procreate. On the other hand, transgender children appear disruptive because a gendered child is something of an oxymoron since children are supposed to escape, at least temporarily, sexual difference. Even when the strict discrimination between boys and girls is the subject of more and more policing, the word ‘children’ designates a gender-neutral category. Transgender children, then, pinpoint the contradictory imperative at work in the gendered reproductive dispositive. Their embrace of the ‘wrong’ gender reveals how Oedipal reproductive futurities are at work in our conception of gender, and how deeply gender, sex and sexuality are intertwined in contemporary biopolitics. This chapter aims to describe a process of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation: how the queerness in children is territorialised by regulatory gender norms; how transgender children in turn appropriate and deterritorialise these norms; how discourses about or fascination with transgender children reterritorialise their queerness into an acceptable drama. My claim is that gender identity as well as our notions of sex and gender are parts of an assemblage, that is, a complex yet relatively stable collective production, combining a range of heterogeneous elements, enunciative or machinic (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 81). The sex/gender assemblage shapes our comprehension of identities, of families and of sexuality, and the disruption created by transgender children can help us in mapping it since the abundant and contradictory discourses surrounding them expose some of the paradoxes holding it together. The fear of transgender children, then, reveals a triangulating machine, where the existence of a transgender child among the flock of normal children would impact the educative structure itself, which in turn would change all of its subjects into multiplying trans-children. As war machines, transgender children raise the fear of contagion:1 if they so shamelessly break the rules, what is to prevent the rest of the flock

112  Mat Fournier from following suit? As war machines, transgender children disrupt the gender assemblage; as desiring-machines, as we will see, they play around and use its elements to plug in their own desires, representational, behavioural, libidinal.

Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk ‘Just tell them I’m a chipmunk!’ This is what Andy, three years old, reportedly answered to their mother, who complained that she didn’t know what to say to people asking whether the child was a boy or a girl (Meyer 2014: 17). From an adult perspective, the sentence has an ironical finality appealing to our sense of humour and to a need for independence: ‘Just tell them I’m a chipmunk’ might be the perfect ‘Mind your own business’ witty answer to the gender question, or to any other identity-oriented inquiry for that matter. The implicit here is that I am, obviously, not a chipmunk. From a child’s perspective, however, the possibility of a becomingchipmunk cannot be disregarded. The implicit is that I might very well, after all, be a chipmunk, or turn into one, or several – enough chipmunks that you won’t, at some point, be able to identify which one I am. Chipmunks run, climb and escape. They are almost impossible to catch, yet everywhere to be seen. They are fast breeders, an invasive and non-threatened species. They are also, to anyone’s eyes, easy to identify, but male and female are undifferentiated to a non-expert’s eye. They are omnivorous, a companion species thriving around humans but feeling just as comfortable in human-deprived environments such as forest ecosystems; and, most of all, chipmunks form a multiplicity. If you live in the eastern part of Northern America, you know that there is always a chipmunk, somewhere; but there is never one chipmunk – if only because they move too fast and are too indiscernible from one another. In A Thousand Plateaus, the ‘Memories of a Sorcerer’ first describes the becoming-animal by asserting its multiple, molecular nature: one becomes a pack, not a pet; a people, not an individual. A multiplicity, as the Go pawns of the war machine, relies on ‘anonymous, collective, or third-person [functions]’: individuals don’t distinguish one from another based on hierarchy or duality but rather in terms of speed and action (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 352–3). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari evoke Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s impulse to ‘write like a rat’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 240). Witnessing the agonising death of a poisoned pack of rats, Hofmannsthal’s narrator, Lord Chandos, is seized by a deep and, as Deleuze and Guattari underscore, ‘anti-natural’ empathy,

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’  113 which is to guide his future endeavours as a writer (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 240). The radical change described here cannot be reduced to an empathy with a creature or a species. Becoming-animal isn’t becoming something. It isn’t a transition from one form to another, or a ‘journey’, as some like to describe the process involved in gender reassignment therapies. By no means do I intend to present gender transitioning as a form of a Deleuze-Guattarian becoming. But, if a transgender child happens to impart on a becoming-animal, it is no accident that the chipmunks present themselves as its vector. Chipmunks, to a North American child from the twenty-first century, are what rats were to early twentieth-century writers: an invisible and proliferating survivor. For the grown-ups tending to their garden, caring about well-­organised flowerbeds, clean gutters and manicured lawns, chipmunks are a war machine. They invade from all sides, creating nuisances so tiny that each of them is individually almost unnoticeable, but which are numerous and varied enough to maintain a permanent state of alarm. They are not powerful enough to take over the house, but certainly assertive enough to prevent the power apparatus from imposing its perfect order on every inch of the territory. But for children, a becoming-chipmunk unleashes desiring flows. Fun, mischievous, elegant and fluffy, the chipmunk is gifted with perpetual motion and forever escapes the limits of individuality. The chipmunk is a people, like Hofmannsthal’s rats, which deassembles and reassembles itself at will, magically safe from the severing process of the three Oedipal limitations: alive or dead, parent or child, boy or girl (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 75).

The Queer Child The word ‘children’, in its plural form, has two different meanings: it can refer to human beings in their infancy, or to the offspring of a human being. A similar overlap can be found in French, with the word enfants, or in the German word Kinder. This overlap, however, doesn’t entirely extend to the singular form of the word: somebody’s child, singular, is usually introduced according to its gender, as ‘son’ or ‘daughter’, since the word ‘child’ is gender neutral. Children, then, lose their gender in plurality, but remain forever placed under a parent’s tutelage, a fact bearing significant weight in discussions about queer or transgender children. The very definition of ‘children’ precludes an array of attributes, more or less loosely attached to adulthood, the key among which is sexuality, and the knowledge thereof – Genesis’ forbidden fruit.

114  Mat Fournier Central to the discussions swarming around transgender children is the question of the ties between sexuality and gender. Children are also, by definition, minors, since they can’t speak for themselves. The French word enfant can be traced to its Latin origin as infans, or in farer, ‘unable to speak’. The Germanic word ‘child’ has a very different kinship, since its Proto-Indo-European root, g(’)elt-, designates the womb, and then evolved to refer to the foetus in ancient Germanic.2 In both cases, the words evolved from designating only very young forms of human life (babies or foetuses) to cover a much wider age range, from early infancy to adulthood. But if one accepts that a word always carries a trace of its etymology, a child is precisely a child because it doesn’t have complete access to language (i.e. Latin etymology), or because it is not yet an autonomous individual (i.e. Germanic etymology). The tautological question of children’s ability to speak for themselves underlies discussions about transgender children. Do children know what they are saying? Do they know what they are talking about, particularly so when they broach those subjects that are deemed ‘adult’, sexuality and gender? This brings us back to Genesis’ forbidden fruit: as the Bible tells us, there is a strong connection between speaking for oneself and finding out the truth about sexuality. As with Adam and Eve, children are defined by their innocence, that is, their complete estrangement from sex. Children are defined by their non-sexuality, or their non-reproductive sexuality, which according to the Bible is one and the same. And yet, in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s words, ‘if you scratch a child, you will find a queer’. In The Queer Child, Stockton argues that ‘every child is queer’ and, simultaneously, that the notion of child itself is intrinsically queer, ‘strange’ and ‘getting stranger’ (2009: 1). Stockton writes: In spite of Anglo-American cultures . . . thinking that the child can be a carefully controlled embodiment of non-complication (increasingly protected from labour, sex, and painful understanding), the child has gotten thick with complication . . . In fact, the very moves to free the child from density . . . have only made it stranger, more fundamentally foreign, to adults. (2009: 5)

The notion of childhood, once it escapes the safe borders of infancy (the creature who, literally, cannot speak), becomes a paradox. As I will discuss later with the case of Jazz Jennings, narratives describing transgender children often use the ‘wrong mind in the wrong body’ explanation. But couldn’t this argument be applied, following in the

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’  115 footsteps of Stockton, to any child? The innocence defining childhood is, in fact, tied to a set of original physical incapacities – forming words, feeling genital stimulation – which their developing bodies progressively escape, through a series of undefined thresholds. Children, as a category, are a perfect example of the non-congruency associated with transgender narratives or diagnoses.3 Depending on the speaker and the conversation, the actual age and the physical developmental stage defining childhood vary to sometimes include the first years of puberty. In Northern American and European liberal societies, one is often still considered a child at twelve or thirteen years old. Physically speaking, in this framework, children can talk, have sexual intercourse, bear or raise other children, work or fight in wars. Mentally, however, their radical estrangement from those adult endeavours defines them. The queerness described by Stockton stems from the notion of childhood itself. Queer children, then, are less an exception than the anomalous element in a series: they are the animal running in front of the pack. Looking into the role of animals in queer children’s narratives, Stockton gives her own descriptions of becoming-animal. Analysing the recurring pattern of ‘girls-with-dogs’, Stockton follows Deleuze and Guattari in seeing the animal as a vehicle, a mount, enabling the child to outride an otherwise inescapable situation (Stockton 2009: 93–5). The queer child is maybe not so much the child who finds itself caught in ‘thick complication’, but the one who somehow manages to travel further into the maze.

Oedipus and Reproductive Futurity Stockton’s queer child, as a figure, is an orphan, in the same way as ‘the unconscious is an orphan’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 49). Its queerness estranges him from any parentality, any futurity – at least temporarily. Twice lonesome, the queer child is, in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, a bachelor. As described in the last chapter of Kafka, the bachelor, like the anomalous element in the series of the becoming-animal, isn’t a subject, but gives a voice (or a vehicle) to the pack, the collective assemblage, precisely because of its situation of estrangement (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 83–4). In itself, the bachelor has no future in the pack. Transgender children, however – for they are a crowd, a tribe, always discussed in plural form, an aspect to which I will return later – are highly familialised; they seem to appear, in fact, only in family-related contexts. ‘My child is transgender’: the sentence avoids asserting the child’s chosen gender, but furthermore hints at the parental emotional distress and educational dilemmas. All in all, the most important word

116  Mat Fournier in this utterance is ‘my’, the ego reaffirming its individuating power. Transgender children, it appears, are mostly discussed in relationship to their parents, or to the parental actions, decisions and dilemmas for which they call. Rather than being given a voice of their own, they are presented as a collective problem addressed from the perspective of the Oedipal society for which parents stand. I want to make it clear that I am not discussing those two figures, the lonesome queer child and the ever-growing tribe of transgender children, as separate actual human beings, but as representational assemblages. A transgender child can very well be at the same time a queer child. It would be untrue, however, to assume that representational assemblages don’t have any influence on actual individuals. If, as Lee Edelman claims, ‘queerness names the side of those not “fighting for the children”’ (2004: 3), transgender children clearly belong to the other side, and even name it. This is not to say that every child reclaiming for itself a transgender identity should, or shouldn’t, be described as queer; but that the words ‘transgender children’, as the locus of public controversies, whether from a supportive or an adverse perspective, are the name of an attempt to navigate reproductive futurities. If the queer child embodies the celibate machine with all its potential for intensive eroticism, transgender children work as a collective assemblage, eating away the borders of the family assemblage and threatening its stability. As Lee Edelman points out in No Future, the figure of the Child holds a discursive coercive power, binding us to take its side in the manner of a Möbius strip: politically, there is really no other side to be defended. There is no arguing against the Child, since it ‘has come to embody for us the telos of the social order’ (Edelman 2004: 10–11). In other words, the Child is a control apparatus. Edelman grounds his argument in the Lacanian opposition between death drive and symbolic order, where queerness constitutes a counterweight to civil order inasmuch as it is able to embrace the negativity of the death drive (2004: 27). The symbolic order rests on a stable representational structure, valuing identities and continuity; the figure of the Child is used as an anchor for the stability of collective order – as opposed to individual jouissance. The child, here, is never considered as an individual, but rather as an undifferentiated projection in the future. Deleuze and Guattari don’t figure among Edelman’s references, but Edelman’s point can nonetheless be examined in the light of AntiOedipus’s depiction of the ‘Holy Family’. Familial triangulation is characterised by its implacable stability – it’s a ‘generalized Oedipus’, or a ‘structural’ Oedipus, encompassing once and for all every possible

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’  117 combination, crushing and repressing the machines of desire (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 51–2). Whereas Edelman sees the death drive as a counterweight, an open access to immediacy barred only by the overimposed structure of futurity, Deleuze and Guattari point towards the lack of lack, the fullness of desiring-machines. This fullness makes the investment in the child all the more important, since children, with their ever-changing bodies, constitute a point where the apparatus of control can leak, a possible rupture in the assemblage. If the figure of the child anchors reproductive normativity, children themselves, with their unstable corporeality, are more or less involved in disrupting it. The articulation between the Oedipal familial triangulation, that is, heteronormative parentality, and the capitalist field of immanence is at the core of the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: ‘We are all little colonies, and it is Oedipus that colonizes us’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 265). The coercive power of the child pointed out by Edelman isn’t rooted only in temporality (i.e. our future), but also in identity. Being colonised, we reterritorialise the world inside of our colony: ‘the little ego’ expands to the dimensions of the universe, as a totalising syllogism. Being centred by the all-encompassing triangulation, the ego safely perceives itself as an all-encompassing centre, an end in itself. ‘My child is transgender.’ At stake here is sexual difference, and the channelling of sexuality (sensuality, desire) into reproductive heterosexuality. As mentioned earlier, Oedipus rests on the differentiating structure separating the living from the dead, the parent from the child, and the male from the female. If the queer child is an orphan, transgender children are a familial tragedy. The appearance of a transgender child in the family circle will plunge the protagonists in a world of sorrows where nothing can ever be what it was supposed to be. ‘Is being transgender or non-binary a choice?’ asks one of the first sections of The Transgender Teen, a ‘handbook’ dedicated to ‘supporting’ parents and professionals. As the following sentence strongly states, the answer is no: ‘People don’t choose their gender . . . Many parents find greater compassion for their teen once they understand and accept this critical idea. People are who they are’ (Brill and Kenney 2016: 10). The chosen language here is that of twelve-step programmes: compassion, acceptance and common sense will lead toward familial harmony. The supportive parent needs to be supported through a grieving process, as if the change of gender meant the disappearance of the entire person, the complete loss of the child as its parents knew it. Even though I am ready to believe that, if there is such thing as ‘successful parenting’, it must consist of a long series of

118  Mat Fournier grieving processes, the gender mourning and the unconditional support it is supposed to require never fail to hurt my own queer feelings. ‘We want all families struggling with gender challenges to understand that they are not alone,’ claims The Transgender Child, the first ‘handbook’ published by Brill in 2008 (xii). At what point might those statements of good intentions begin to feel insulting towards the source of all the drama – who is, after all, an innocent child?

Medical Reterritorialisation: I Am Jazz Eventually, the transgender tragedy turns into a restorative drama: after suffering great traumas, the family reassembles itself, embracing a new futurity. Don’t misunderstand me: I would take the supportive family and educators any time. Growing up as I did in a transphobic family and society isn’t something I would wish on any child, innocent or not. But, as Julian Gill-Peterson argues in his article ‘Growing Up Trans in the 1960s and the 2010s’, this normalising discourse of innocence and support is rooted in a ‘fundamentalist belief in the separateness of femininity and masculinity’ (2017: 216). Furthermore, it often has the opposite effect of robbing children of their own, queer, voices. Referring to the ‘massive gender trauma being packaged as liberal progress’, Gill-Peterson explores the discursive implications of the encounter between two celebrity figures, Jazz Jennings and Caitlyn Jenner. Even though Jenner was by far the older of the two, Jennings, who had made her first appearance in the media at age five, could at fourteen claim seniority in the transgender community. However, Jennings herself reclaimed Jenner as a role model, giving her a retroactive position in her life, and thus negating her own history. The anecdote reveals, according to Gill-Peterson, an epistemic violence, normalising transgender life ‘through whiteness, money, media and medicine’ (2017: 214–16). The same process of reterritorialisation is manifest in I Am Jazz, a 2014 children’s book framed as a memoir of young Jennings herself. Jessica Herthel, who co-wrote the book, explains that it was written in order to help other children make sense of Jazz’s ‘difference’ (2014). Though the storybook cover doesn’t indicate any specific age for the audience, the style of the drawings and the text would suggest that it is addressed to children around six or seven years of age. The content of the book, however, is clearly aimed at their parents. Parents are the real heroes of the story since Jazz, pictured from her first to her last appearance with a smile on her face, doesn’t have a story per se – which

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’  119 is, after all, the whole point of the book. In this particular storybook, there won’t be any drama, any monsters, any fears to overcome, any evil witches, or even any challenges for the young narrator. The (unquestionably heterosexual) parental couple, however, is put to trial by their offspring’s situation. They don’t understand that Jazz has ‘a girl brain but a boy body’ (Herthel and Jennings 2014: 9), however hard she tries to convince them, until, one day, their fairy godmother intervenes, in the shape of ‘a new doctor’: Then one amazing day, everything changed. Mom and Dad took me to meet a new doctor . . . Afterwards, the doctor spoke to my parents and I heard the word ‘transgender’ for the very first time. That night at bedtime, my parents both hugged me and said, ‘We understand now. Be who you are. We love you no matter what.’ (Herthel and Jennings 2014: 10)

Thanks to the good doctor’s intervention, Jazz’s Oedipal ‘reduction’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 264–5) is completed, as shown in the illustration accompanying the text: in Daddy’s arms, a radiant Jazz is smiled at by a radiant Mommy (Mommy being, of course, shorter in size and blonder of hair than Daddy). The family triangle is closed; Jazz has found her way home, she isn’t a queer orphan; the free-flowing desire has been recaptured. A simple adjustment: this is all that is needed, the book tells its liberal readers, to make everyone perfectly happy, and let the heterosexual family circle remain unbroken. Referring to Growing Up Trans, a PBS Frontline documentary aired in 2007, Gill-Peterson claims that it ‘works as a revisionist history, carefully relocating these children into a position of ahistoricity by confining their existence to a new frontier of medicine’ (2017: 215). The same argument can be made about I Am Jazz. The lack of historicity ties gender transitioning to medical technologies – hormone replacement therapy and surgery – cutting away transgender children, such as Jazz, from queer children of previous generations. ‘There is nothing queer about Jazz’ could be a perfect summary of Herthel’s argument, both in the storybook itself and in her various commentaries. The paradox of this discursive medicalisation, however, is that the only medical intervention transgender children undergo is psychological, and that, in most narratives, the psychologist’s work is mostly aimed at their cisgender parents. Furthermore, the lack of historicity in those accounts is only possible through an implicit belief in a universal and visible gender binarism. ‘Gender transition’ is often understood in spatial terms, as referring to a well-traced necessary journey from one safe point to another, from one gender to the other (Aizura 2012: 139–44). Transitioning

120  Mat Fournier somehow happens outside of temporality, a step aside enabling one to step in again. But where does it leave transgender children, whose bodies and stories are woven in time and changes?

Chemical Castration and the Suppressed Phallus A couple of years ago, while I was hovering around the photocopier in the faculty lounge of my college, I found myself being the uncomfortable witness of a conversation about transgender children between two of my colleagues – who knew or didn’t know that I am transgender; but after all, I don’t own a patent. One of them claimed that, as supportive as they were, they couldn’t help thinking that the whole matter was going too far. ‘Children can’t be having surgery!’ they argued. ‘Surgical intervention on children, can you imagine!’ The other agreed, horrified at the thought of innocent creatures being submitted to the surgeon’s knife over a politically correct tantrum. I felt compelled to step up and say something, but as I opened my mouth, I was struck by a sudden numbness. One of the many reasons for this sudden mental paralysis was that I didn’t know the first thing about transgender children. But the main reason for my silence was that my inner child was bursting out in cries of joy and hope: ‘If only, if only,’ my inner queer child thought, ‘if only we could have had surgery! What joy! What life we could have had! What fun, what safe body, what worry-free and radiant soul!’ Of course, my photocopier shyness can also be traced to the fact that, a childless queer myself, I don’t feel entitled to take public positions on reproductive futurities. It was only a moment later that I found the obvious answer to the copyroom conversation: transgender children never undergo surgery.4 Even outraged paediatricians such as Cretella wouldn’t raise the image of the evil doctor pointing his castrator knife in the direction of the (innocent) genitals of small children. For lack of a real knife, a metaphorical one would have to do: referring to pharmaceutical puberty blockers, Cretella branded the metaphor of ‘chemical castration’.5 The idea of ‘chemical castration’ applied to children presents a contradiction in terms: children aren’t, by definition, able to be parents. In itself, this tension is already contributing to Cretella’s, and my photocopier colleagues’, point: ‘something is very wrong here’. Among other associations, chemical castration evokes the idea of sex offenders. With the surplus of meaning typical of far-right discourses, the metaphor associates children and rapists and creates a network of intensities where children are at the same time violated and violators. It is also worth mentioning that the castration

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’  121 fantasy only applies to male genital organs: it is not so much about sex than it is about penises. The same applies, oddly enough, in Jazz’s story. As the good doctor explains, Jazz’s problem is one of incongruence: ‘a girl brain but a boy body’. But how wrong exactly can children’s bodies be? In the book’s illustrations, an awkward-looking Jazz wearing boys’ clothes and enviously glaring at a troupe of ballerinas in pink tutus becomes radiant as soon as she is allowed to wear a skirt. Those images precisely contradict the ‘brain in wrong body’ theory: there seems to be absolutely nothing wrong with Jazz’s body. Almost every page of the book shows her in motion, true to her chosen name: we see her dancing, running, swimming, playing soccer, singing . . . The reader is left to assume that the reference to Jazz’s body is really a reference to her sexual organs. At what point children are supposed to be examining each other’s genitals and be concerned about the results isn’t addressed in the book. But what is exactly the rationale for explaining that Jazz really is a normal girl, if the whole explanation points toward an invisible bodily anomaly? In an interview with the Huffington Post describing how she started writing about Jazz, Herthel traces the origin of her inspiration back to a magazine picture of a girl ‘born without half of her arm’. The picture distressed Herthel’s four-year-old daughter, giving the mother the desire to teach her to accept other children’s disabilities (Herthel 2014). From the visible truncated arm to the suppressed penis: one can’t help wondering what Freud would make of those missing and superfluous members. Yet in both cases, the castrating knife fantasy and I Am Jazz’s normative medicalisation, we find ourselves facing some version of Lacan’s Great Signifier. Why does the complex operation asserting Jazz’s normality require her phallus as the pillar holding together the entire narrative? Is this about sexual difference? How do those three entirely different epistemologies – Cretella’s conservative natural law, post-Freudian Oedipalisation and liberal identity politics – lead us to the exact same point?

War Machine: Rupturing the Gender Assemblage If children are transgender, it is, of course, because they are gendered. Not in a structural manner, since children’s gender/sex isn’t taken into account in the same way throughout time and space, but by the particular assemblage of liberal Western societies at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. Just as the queer child brings out the queerness inherent to childhood, the transgender child is the anomalous element in a series of

122  Mat Fournier gendered children, bringing gender to its disembodied completion. The product of a specific epistemological and technological power apparatus, transgender children belong to the gender assemblage of Western contemporary liberal societies. Transgender children, or more precisely the reactions, counter-reactions and moral dramas they seem to create, can help us in drawing the outlines of this particular assemblage. Every counselling book on transgender children begins with the gender talk: there is nothing wrong with your child, since gender and sex are two entirely different things. As Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper state: Gender identity refers to a person’s internalized, deeply felt sense of being male, female, both, or neither. It can be different from the biological sex assigned at birth. Because gender identity is internal and personally defined, it is not visible to others. (2008: 4)

As opposed to the previously defined category of ‘biological sex’, gender is invisible, that is, disembodied. It is also intrinsically linked to its correlative term of ‘identity’, making it a ‘personal category’, an argument which already renders the above-quoted definition problematic: how can identity be ‘neither’? If I am ‘neither’ – gender, nationality, religion, race – do I still own an identity? The possibility of being ‘neither’, here, is less a valid option than a benevolent footnote designed to recapture the tiny portion of the population which wouldn’t go along with the obvious choices. The paradox is that the liberal self-rewarding task of ‘being myself’ doesn’t seem possible without any sense of belonging to at least some categories, nor without any interest in reclaiming them, if only to revise their boundaries. You can choose, but taking too much distance from predetermined, intelligible designations eventually ruins the self-designing process itself. I am not arguing that ‘gender’ doesn’t exist. But like any assemblage, it is very far from individual: an assemblage is a heterogeneous, more or less stable, conglomerate, embedded in multiple dimensions. And it is, at the same time, ‘a collective assemblage of enunciation’ and ‘a machinic assemblage of desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 81). Gender is not ‘personal’, any more than enunciation and desire can ever be. If gender identity is a choice (an idea against which Brill and Pepper vigorously argue), the choice is as tainted as picking a drink at Starbucks. Gender identity, as the Starbucks menu, belongs to the capitalist apparatus of capture: framed in the rhetoric of choice, of expression of singularity, but embedded in a predetermined biopolitical field. This is how the contradictory narratives of Cretella and Herthel can end up on the same phallic point. ‘On the whole, the connections of organ-machines suited

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’  123 to desiring-production give way to a pairing of people under the rules of familial reproduction’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 71). Far from being innocent, ordinary, unmentioned, Jazz’s body needs to be recaptured into a differentiating, signifying assemblage, even at the cost of normative heterosexual modes of reproduction. The norm can reassemble itself with a stretch, and with the help of the good doctor. This is where Herthel and Cretella split paths, and this is where the notion of gender takes over the ‘natural laws’ of sex. The question then becomes: at what point will the anomalous leak? How far can the Oedipal social fabric be stretched? Trapped in a web of enunciative contradictions, transgender children reveal how deeply the discriminating function of Oedipus is coding the gender assemblage. Ultimately, the ‘massive gender trauma of liberal society’ cannot escape its heterosexual origins. Depending on which side of the sex/gender assemblage one stands, transgender children are described as threatening or as threatened, as trouble or as in trouble, as endangering or as endangered. But they generally are treated as a collective phenomenon calling for more gender policing, be it related to an essentialist vision of gender roles, or to a liberal calling for ‘gender affirmation’. Whatever its relationship to the socius, to its parents or to other children, any child trying to escape the differentiating severance of gender binarism becomes part of a war machine and, as such, doomed to be appropriated, reterritorialised (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 248). From a conservative perspective, transgender children should be rescued – from themselves, from their immature parents, from the destructive and selfish experimentations of liberal ideology. From a liberal perspective, transgender children should be supported by the family-school-medicine assemblage in order to assert their ‘real selves’ – their lines of flight are to be stratified, reterritorialised in terms of closed, differentiated, socially functioning identities. My father wrote to me: ‘They say on TV that some want to abolish sexual difference at school. Can you believe it? This is beyond my understanding.’ He knows I’m trans, but being trans doesn’t explain anything, a fact of which I’m too well aware. Jazz can eventually become a woman after paying a signifying prize, but she cannot become a chipmunk. Chipmunks don’t have phalluses. They don’t differentiate. As opposed to the orphan figure of the queer child, transgender children are perceived as a tribe. As the legions of chipmunks disturbing the neat lawns of suburbia, transgender children spread the seeds of chaos in school bathrooms. The plurality used to describe them as a social phenomenon reveals the danger they present for an Oedipal society based on strongly delineated identities. ‘But we are not interested in

124  Mat Fournier characteristics; what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling. I am legion’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 239). Transgender children are legion, and becoming-animal is as such becoming an epidemic. Precisely because they are not accounted for in the Oedipal triangle of familial reproduction, and can’t partake in the differentiating process of filiation, queers are bound to multiply. As vampires or zombies, they can and will duplicate themselves at will, all the while being marked by the loneliness of the undifferentiated (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 71).

Floating About: Partial Genders and Desiring Bodies Melanie Klein, who is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the analyst least prone to see everything in terms of Oedipus’, is at the origin of the theory of partial objects. Yet she ‘failed’, according to them, ‘to grasp the logic’ of her own discovery. Instead of seeing them as a free-flowing process, Klein reads them as signifying parts of an Oedipal scenario involving the child and his parents. Partial objects, however, belong to the same logic of production as desiring-machines. Desiring-machines produce, pillage, invade and cut; they don’t have identities, genders, borders or individualities. ‘A [desiring-] machine may be defined as a system of interruption or breaks (coupures) . . . Every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual material flow (hylè) that it cuts into’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 36; emphasis by translator). Partial objects aren’t to be considered as pre-existing ‘objects’ assimilated to create meaning, but as stages of a permanent, non-teleological process: they are cuts from the flow, moments of junctions and productions. Children’s connections to partial objects belong to a free circulating flow, not to an identity formation narrative. Children, like schizos, retain the ability to build instead of signifying: their desires flow into machinic productions, truly innocent from the Oedipal assemblage meant to recapture them. The desiring-machines they produce, or, rather, plug themselves into, are ‘asignifying’: to revert to Brill and Pepper’s terminology, they are ‘neither’, since they entirely ignore any type of socially productive categorisation. This does not mean, however, that children ignore the existence of those categories, any more than they ignore the existence of language, signification, sexuality or social expectations. But, as for the schizo, categories and significations become appropriated into something else, into an a-signifying productive flow, which in essence doesn’t ‘mean’ anything since it is entirely foreign to any signifying process. Partial

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’  125 objects are part of this free flow of productivity and they reveal how children can turn themselves into desiring-machines. Far from inscribing them in the Oedipal scenario, as Klein concluded, partial objects are a way out, similar to animal-becomings: both, the object and the animal, are vehicles of deterritorialisation. Describing Klein’s interpretation of partial object as part of the Oedipal narrative, Deleuze and Guattari speak of ‘reduction’. The same, I argue, can be said of gender. Instead of an ‘identity’, the gender territorialised by the child can be considered as a partial object: something to expand toward, something to expand the skin envelope, something to love and to play with. Cretella’s obsession with castration is telling the truth about Oedipal individuation: it is about the lack; transgender children do not lack, they find themselves invading a surplus of meaning which fractures the entire sex/gender assemblage. Or, more precisely, they use the assemblage and its conglomerate of meaning, bodies, body parts, clothing, gestures, images, collective enunciations, to cut and produce a surplus of their own. I am not claiming that transgender children don’t know what they are doing – any more than I know what I am doing: the key word is that we are ‘doing’, not ‘being’. What I object to is the reterritorialisation of transgender children’s machinic productions into something they don’t ‘mean’ – a validation of gender binarism and Oedipal reproductive futurities. Stockton evokes the figure of the ‘ghostly gay child’, ‘floating about’ the meanings of gay, ‘[making] gay far more liquid and labile than it has seemed in recent years’ (2009: 4). By redirecting this perspective from the sexual orientation perspective towards the gender assemblage, we encounter a liquidity of the same kind. Cameron, one of the teenagers featured in a series of portraits assembled by author and photographer Susan Kuklin, has their own experience of floating. Kuklin writes: Gender does not have endpoints: it’s three-dimensional. Males float around somewhere, females float around somewhere else, and some people don’t float at all – they swim. What I mean is, unlike the floaters, swimmers control where they’re going. The swimmers do their gender instead of be their gender. Or at least they direct their presentations. (2014: 102–3)

‘Doing’ instead of ‘being’ is precisely what gender, as a signifying and discriminating process, doesn’t allow. As the child reaches towards partial objects to outgrow bodily limitations, the swimmer navigates gender – that is, an array of bodily limitations – as a space. The swimmer’s body becomes, like the body without organ, ‘an egg, crisscrossed

126  Mat Fournier with axes, banded with zones, localised with areas and fields, banded with gradient, traversed by potentials, marked by thresholds’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 84). The difference between the ‘floaters’ and the ‘swimmers’ in Cameron’s description is one of connection with the flux: while the floaters are subjected to currents they don’t even clearly perceive, swimmers are able to plug in and out, to produce, to recreate themselves or the space around them. The body without gender is an egg, or a pod: not an identity but a space, striated, crisscrossed, full of potentials, unfinished but self-contained, not outside of the assemblage but saturated with it. ‘Just tell them I’m a chipmunk: don’t let me be something that can be traced, categorized, sorted out, understood and differentiated. Let me inhabit all dimensions of space like a swimmer occupies the water, let me crawl underground, let me climb up the trees and run along the power lines. Let me surprise you, let me be someone else, something else, someone you cannot catch – for if you do catch me, there will come another, and another, until you never will be able to tell which one you caught.’ Transgender children, as a multiplicity spreading around the borders of the assemblage, may have, in fact, all the disruptive powers attributed to them by those they frighten so much. Let them surprise us.

Notes 1. War machines are described by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus as ‘a pure form of exteriority’ disrupting the social stability – or state apparatus. Comparable to a game of Go, they don’t rely on organised and individualised functions but on indistinguishable and innumerable ‘pawns’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 351–4). 2. See (last accessed 13 June 2018). 3. The first point in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is: ‘A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics.’ Available at (last accessed 13 June 2018). 4. See (last accessed 13 June 2018). 5. ‘Yet, we chemically castrate gender-confused children with puberty blockers’ (Cretella 2017a). Cretella adds that ‘cross-sex hormones’ permanently sterilise transgender adults, ignoring the fact that transgender men can bear children.

References Aizura, A. (2012), ‘The Persistence of Transgender Travel Narratives’, in T.  T. Cotton (ed.), Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, New York: Routledge, pp. 139–56.

‘Just Tell Them I’m a Chipmunk’  127 Brill, S. and L. Kenney (2016), The Transgender Teen, San Francisco: Cleis Press. Brill, S. and R. Pepper (2008), The Transgender Child, San Francisco: Cleis Press. Cretella, M. (2017a), I’m a Pediatrician: Here’s What I Did When a Little Boy Patient Said He Was a Girl, The Daily Signal, (last accessed 13 June 2018). Cretella, M. (2017b), I’m a Pediatrician: How Transgender Ideology Has Infiltrated my Field and Produced Large-Scale Child Abuse, The Daily Signal, (last accessed 13 June 2018). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edelman, L. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Gill-Peterson, J. (2017), ‘Growing up Trans in the 1960s and the 2010s’, in M. P. J. Bohlmann (ed.), Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 213–29. Herthel, J. (2014), Why I Wrote a Book about a Transgender Child, Huffington Post, < https : / / www . huffingtonpost . com / jessica - herthel / why - i - wrote - a - book - about - a transgender-child_b_5760738.html> (last accessed 13 June 2018). Herthel, J. and J. Jennings (2014), I Am Jazz, New York: Penguin. Kuklin, S. (2014), Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. Meyer, E. and A. Sansfaçon (2014), Supporting Transgender and Gender Creative Youth: Schools, Families, and Communities in Action (Gender and Sexualities in Education), New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. Stockton, K. B. (2009), The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chapter 7

Affective Atmospheres: Joy, Ethics and the Howl of Children and Young People’s (A)Sexuality Ian Thomas

Everything is simply an encounter in the universe, a good or a bad encounter. (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 45)

Ella walks across her school’s rugby pitch along with three other young people (Sophie, Jacob and Michael) and three researchers (Emma, Ian and Catt).1 We are all participating in a study using mobile phones as data collection – this is part of the fieldwork.2 With her phone’s camera turned towards her, Ella pouts her lips and takes a selfie. Emma notices and asks, ‘Do you do the same face every time?’ ‘Yeah,’ is Ella’s response. Later, as the group continues walking, Ella picks a flower from the grass underfoot and holds it in shot whilst pouting to the camera. Though there are some interesting encounters happening here, between Ella and her phone, what forms the basis for this chapter is the way adult reactions to those encounters are framed in relation to age; more precisely in relation to discourses of sexuality attached to age. Ella is thirteen years old, and with her being a ‘young person’, the prevailing discourses of adult sexualities read this event differently compared to if she had been five years old – a ‘child’. According to Louise Jackson, modern sexual subjectivities are underpinned by the labels of youth, adolescence and childhood, which are positioned as ‘formative stages in the growth of sexual and self-awareness as well as periods of susceptibility to sexual danger’ (2006: 250). Childhood is seen as a time of innocence, a historical construct, which James Kincaid (1998) primarily locates in the discourses of sexuality in the Victorian era. For Kincaid, even though the modern child is evacuated of sexuality by the child’s innocence, they are still dominated by sexuality, a ‘negative sexuality . . . but sexuality all the same’ (1998: 55). Young people occupy an uneasy middle ground between childhood innocence and adult responsibility, such that their expressions of

Affective Atmospheres  129 sexuality are often labelled as signs of ‘deviancy, precocity and “mental deficiency”’ (Jackson 2006: 251). Therefore, though there are different reactions to Ella the child and Ella the young person taking a selfie, both Ellas are trapped by the dichotomy of responsibility and innocence, of adult sexuality and child-like asexuality. Rather than trying to find a resolution on either side of the (a)sexual dichotomy, this chapter works with what is normally construed as sexuality as ‘one flux among others, entering into conjunction with other fluxes’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 75), and therefore as the interplay of both sexual and asexual elements. I initially adopt Ben Anderson’s (2009) ‘atmospheres’ as spaces of intensity in order to map out this flux, and the ways in which engagements with materiality can generate bodily intensities and affects. However, through a closer reading of Deleuze’s writing on affect, I then argue that the formation of atmospheres is linked to the opening up or narrowing down of bodies,3 or joyful (good) or sad (bad) effects, and in turn the production of particular sexed and gendered becomings. Mapping out affective atmospheres, their joys, sadnesses and becomings, offers an ethics of children and young people’s lived experiences that marks a shift away from moral discourses that seek to territorialise and fix the flux of young sexualities within the (a) sexuality divide. This focus on affect and intensities has the potential to disrupt the operation of power, and in doing so opens up social systems to ‘a howling outside/inside’ (O’Sullivan 2009: 249). The ‘howl’ that occurs when systems are disrupted echoes Alan Ginsberg’s (2010) poem by the same name. In Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, the poem’s narrator lists numerous transgressions of social, sexual and spatial boundaries, including drug taking, taboo sexual practices and public lewdness, that is, a ‘yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes’ (2010: 850). Rather than having these transgressions lead to lines of death and destruction, they (re-)generate and (re-)energise spaces and the social world (van Engen 2011). However, as Ian Buchanan states, beneath the conscious thrills of transgression ‘insists’ a much simpler joy – affective intensification (2008: 47) – through drugs, sounds, movements, and so on. Affects are therefore the stuff of life, simultaneously having the power to affirm or destroy bodies (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 45). ‘Howl’ concludes: ‘I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse’ (Ginsberg 2010: 857). Here, Ginsberg alludes to the moment of transformation when socially constructed boundaries

130  Ian Thomas are brought down, or at least illuminated through the ‘howl’, as with the walls of the hospital (Mead-Brewer 2013: 169). The liberating motifs of ‘Howl’ share similarities with Deleuze’s references to paintings of ‘screams’, particularly those depicted in the work of Francis Bacon. To ‘howl’, or to ‘scream’, is to make visible pervasive yet invisible forces: ‘If we scream, it is always as victims of invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle, and that even lie beyond pain and feeling’ (Deleuze 2003: 60). Because of their appeal to bodily intensification, howls/screams also operate at a pre-personal level, posing life’s problems through sensation, and thereby ‘triggering an unhinging of faculties, a shock wave that reverberates through the system’ (Ruddick 2010: 38). Working with the howl/scream therefore requires a framework that attends to sensation, difference and affects, leading to this chapter’s experimentation with the concept of ‘atmospheres’.

Affective Atmospheres, Durations and Gendered/ Sexual-Becomings ‘Atmospheres’ have been adopted by various scholars working within the turn to affect, such as Ben Anderson. The significance of Anderson’s work is his archaeology of the concept, bringing together use of atmospheres across different disciplines, such as human geography, anthropology, phenomenology, in order to draw links to the concept of affect. Though atmospheres are often associated with emotional sense-spaces, Anderson highlights their capacity to produce material changes in bodies as ‘transpersonal fields of force’ (2009: 77). Both affect and atmospheres refer to forces that are ‘indeterminate and determinate’ (Anderson 2009: 78). Atmospheres flow outside of their constituent elements (indeterminacy), whilst also having effects in generating further material encounters and other atmospheres (determinacy). In his further work with James Ash, detailing how atmospheres can be methodologically sensed and studied, Anderson suggests that objects/ things in an encounter have a ‘mass’ that ‘weighs’ on other objects, thereby forming an atmosphere (Anderson and Ash 2015). Anderson and Ash further theorise that changes in the configuration of objects/ things in an encounter can alter their ‘mass’, thereby pushing an atmosphere over a threshold into a different state. For example, the mobile phone in my opening vignette had a large ‘mass’ that weighed down Ella’s experimentation with gender and sexuality in the middle of the rugby field. She may have felt ‘lighter’ without the phone, and may

Affective Atmospheres  131 therefore have been moved to a different set of encounters, joining the other young people in running around, screaming, howling and chatting with the research team. Another way of articulating the invisible ‘weight’ of force of an atmosphere can be found in the work of Julia Mahler (2008). Through her ethnographic study of life in Guatemala, Mahler illustrates how atmospheres can be sensed as durations – the slowing down and speeding up of bodies. I am particularly drawn to this sense of ­ atmospheres as the speed of movement, given the importance of ­ changes in ­intensity for Deleuze: ‘Movement does not go from one point to another – rather it happens between two levels as in a ­difference of potential. A difference of intensity produces a phenomenon, releases or ejects it, sends it into space’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 23). Deleuze’s ontology shifts away from thinking about the encountering of concrete ­entities, to the universe as being composed of a series of ‘becomings’, as movement towards a state but never its attainment. Duration is an awareness of this movement between different intensive  regions or bodily states. As such, duration and speed mark out bodily becomings: ‘Speed is to be caught in a becoming’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 24). A focus on atmospheres of durations can therefore form the basis for articulating children and young people’s encounters in the world as a series of gendered and sexual-becomings. Reading duration through atmospheres, the ‘mass’ of objects in an encounter has a ‘weight’ that is experienced and can be sensed through their durations and bodily intensities, which in turn generate particular becomings. Rather than a question of children and young people being ‘sexual’ or not, their encounters in the world can move towards a ‘sexual’ state without becoming it completely. Therefore, although children and young people’s encounters can incorporate sexual fluxes, this does not necessarily imply engagement in what is normatively taken to be ‘sexual’ (Fox and Bale 2017). Thinking through atmospheres and becomings means being open to the ways in which gender and sexual normativities can be creatively worked upon by children and young people, rather than children and young people being innocent and worked upon by predatory adult sexualities (Kincaid 2004). The capacity for becomings to go this or that way, without being fully knowable beforehand, is an important part of the project of ‘howling’ against children and young people’s containment. It is this challenge to what we know, or think we know, about children and young people that Kevin Ohi draws upon in order to rework the ‘innocent child’:

132  Ian Thomas Erotic innocence proceeds most importantly through its assumptions of knowingness: it knows what a child is, and the certainty of that knowledge . . . is what it seeks, above all, to maintain. To oppose erotic innocence with a certainty of one’s own about what children are – for instance, simply to invert its certainties – is to stay within the terms it dictates. The crucial task, therefore, is to make childhood desires legible without reifying them, to recognise them without presumption of knowledge. (2004: 84)

Here, Ohi suggests that wresting ourselves from the imagined figure of the innocent child involves ‘unknowing’ what children and young people are. His concern is that to fall on either side of the (a)sexual binary, for example by a priori assuming that children and young people are always already asexual, is to remain within the same strata that currently confine their gender and sexual-becomings. Thinking through affective atmospheres and Deleuzian becomings, with their sense of indeterminacy, can therefore become part of the process of ‘unknowing’ and making legible what children and young people’s bodies can do – in recognition of them, but without presuming to know. Taking up Ella’s selfie again, the ‘weight’ of her mobile phone can be inferred from the durations it produced, which limited her potential becomings along lines of heteronormative aesthetics, that is, ‘feminine’ pouty lips. However, as emphasised by Deleuze and Parnet, ‘Becomings are not phenomena of imitation or assimilation, but of a double capture’ (2012: 2). Ella’s pose was not so much a sign of her assimilation by an adult sexuality, as imagined through moral panics around sexualisation (Renold et al. 2015), but her temporary capturing and being captured by heteronormative fluxes – a feminine-becoming.4 Furthermore, ‘as someone becomes, what [she] is becoming changes as much as [she] does’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 2). It is this instability in the components of a becoming, such as Ella and ‘femininity’, that can activate different lines of thinking about children and young people’s encounters with sexuality, presenting readings of the selfie-assemblage that are less constrained to the (a)sexual binary. Through Ella’s becoming-feminine, by drawing on fluxes of sexuality, she may have been mobilising a response to bullying via social media. The research team were potentially witnessing an intensive moment, a speeding up of Ella’s durations online. The defiant atmosphere of the selfie-assemblage as it extended into digital space could have been an attempt by Ella to push back against the constraining forces of a heteronormative gaze – for example, through rupturing the dynamics whereby boys solicit ‘sexual’ images in sexting (Renold and Ringrose 2017). This is not the first Deleuzian-inspired reworking of childhood studies, in particular when it comes to girls. Gabrielle Ivinson and Emma Renold

Affective Atmospheres  133 (2013), for example, have similarly drawn on becomings to understand how a young girl’s agency can draw on the past, and open up to the future. However, through a close reading of Deleuze’s work in relation to affect, I now argue that atmospheres and other such affectively inspired approaches, such as Ivinson and Renold’s, are necessary rather than being just another way of thinking children and young people through difference. Within Deleuze’s ethics of affects, the dichotomy of (a)sexuality can be viewed as a moral cage that is toxic to all of our encounters in the world – not just to those of children and young people.

Overturning Sexual Morality with an Appeal to Ethics Deleuze conceptualises affect as the body’s power to act (1988: 49) and, through his work, it is not difficult to equate affect with life as an encounter. He explains, ‘Bodies are not defined by their genus or species, by their organs and functions, but by what they can do, by the affects of which they are capable’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 45). The (a)sexual and gendered categorisations of youth do not necessarily define the limits of what a body can do; instead it is the exercising of a body’s capacities that matters, that is, their affects. Though these affects are generated from encounters between bodies, the compositions in which a body finds itself can narrow down its affects and thus limit the body’s capacities. In Deleuze’s assessment, ‘We live in a world which is generally disagreeable’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 46), where it is not only individuals but also institutions, or ‘established powers’ (2012: 46), that have a stake in narrowing down affects. ‘Anxiety’ is one way that established powers control or enslave us (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 46), with the bodies of children and young people being so affected by anxiety, caught in the flux between adult eroticism and innocence. For example, as highlighted by Mindy Blaise (2013: 195) and others, adult-child encounters can be fraught by anxieties that originate from moral panic discourses and the potential contamination of childhood innocence by adult sexuality. Anxieties can lead to attempts to avoid or limit children and young people’s potential becomings. Alternatively, children and young people’s experimentations with gender and sexual subjectivities can be dismissed as play (Blaise 2009) – thereby returning the child/young person to their innocent state. The distinction between that which opens up bodies to different affects and that which closes them down speaks to this chapter’s use of durations in order to define atmospheres. In Deleuze’s reading of Henri Bergson’s philosophy, space is seen as a composition of matter

134  Ian Thomas and duration, just as atmospheres have material and affective aspects. However, ‘duration is differentiated into contraction and expansion’ (Deleuze 2004: 27), and therefore the opening and closing of affects. Taking this distinction even further, Deleuze finds these processes of contraction and expansion, or opening and closing down, as fundamental to a philosophy of life (1988: 26). Drawing on Baruch Spinoza, an exploration of affect forms the coordinates of a system of thinking of encounters as good or bad, Deleuze explains: The good is when a body directly compounds its relations with ours, and, with all or part of its power, increases ours[;] . . . the bad is when a body decomposes our body’s relation, although it still combines with our parts, but in ways that do not correspond to our essence, as when a poison breaks down the blood. (1988: 22)

Spinoza’s philosophy of life builds upon a rejection of the moral order of Good-Evil, which always refers to ‘transcendent values’ (Deleuze 1988: 23). Instead, the system of good and bad is an ethics of ‘relative and partial’ judgement (Deleuze 1988: 22). Relating this discussion back to children and sexualities studies, the image of the innocent child upholds childhood to a moral standard – it is a transcendent value system. The imagined (innocent) child becomes ‘a weapon used to assault substance and substitute in its place a set of negative inversions: innocence, purity, emptiness’ (Kincaid 2004: 10). As a result, childhood and youth in contemporary society have become marked by lack, such that ‘the child is that which does not have[,] . . . [allowing] the admirer to read just about anything he likes into that vacancy, including a flattering image of his very self’ (Kincaid 2004: 10; original emphasis). The self which is read into children and young people is heterosexual and heteronormative – something Kincaid might have been subtly hinting at through his use of the male pronoun to refer to the admirer of children and young people. This (hetero)normative adult sexuality striates the flux of children and young people’s actual encounters in the world, such that those who leave these strata are deemed to be endangering their own innocence, as well as potentially the innocence of other young people. A new ethical system based on the study of affect through atmospheres ‘howls’ against moral values, supplanting them with the study of ‘qualitative difference of modes of existence’ (Deleuze 1988: 23). Rather than the moral salvation of children and young people’s innocence, which dictates the terms of life, an ethical approach would involve ‘teaching the soul to live its life’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 47). Howling

Affective Atmospheres  135 against dominant discourses of children and young people’s (a)sexuality takes on great importance if, as Deleuze believed, ‘Life is poisoned by the categories of Good and Evil, of blame and merit, sin and redemption’ (1988: 26). Rather than protecting children and young people, adult discourses of childhood innocence poison them, and everyone, by emptying bodies of life/affects. However, in order to teach children and young people and indeed all of us to live, Deleuze offers another set of concepts, joy and sadness, to help recognise good and bad encounters.

Ethics and the Passions of Sadness and Joy Though good and bad form the basis for Deleuze’s ethics from his reading of Spinoza, how these affects are apprehended by the body is through the effects they have in inducing states of joy and sadness. According to Deleuze, ‘we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and our sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our own coherence’ (1988: 19; original emphasis). Joy is therefore an effect of good encounters, as it relates to an increase in a body’s affects, whilst sadness is on the side of the bad, imperilling the constitution of the body. Deleuze situates joy as an antithesis to ‘pleasure’ usually associated with sexuality and sexual expression (Deleuze and Parnet 2012: 74). Though pleasures relate to bodily intensification, they reach a climax and are dead ends of affects (Deleuze 2006: 131). Joy, however, relates to an increase in affective states, without the necessary sense of completion or attainment. Adopting the terminology of joy and of sadness as its counterpart, therefore, completely departs from the stratum within which children and young people’s encounters are contained, that is, normative (adult) understandings of what sexuality is and what it can be. Applying joysadness to Ella’s case study again, the selfie may have been a moment of joy by affirming the flux of sexuality to form a ‘superior totality’ (Deleuze 1988: 21), a better composition, a momentarily happier and more joyful Ella. The selfie-assemblage may also have been a moment of sadness by reproducing divisions within Ella and cutting her off from experiencing other affects, that is, the feeling that she had to form this particular assemblage in order to maintain her status in the school, perhaps. As suggested in this chapter’s earlier discussion of morality, adults, as established powers, attempt to limit children and young people’s gendered and sexual-becomings by channelling these becomings into a heterosexual and heteronormative grid. Though a young person may

136  Ian Thomas experience an increase in their affective state from their worldly encounters, these moments of joy take place within a general atmosphere of sadness caused by the ‘weighing down’ of their becomings by (hetero) normative adult sexualities. Joy in such atmospheres is therefore what Deleuze refers to as a ‘passion’, or ‘passive joy’ (1988: 28, 50, 76), because it is tethered to ‘inadequate ideas’ (1998: 28) – prefigured ideas and imaginings of what bodies can do. The inadequate ideas of children and young people are those that relate to ‘appropriate’ sexual expressions and gender relations that children and young people have based on sex and relationship education taught in school, or ideals of innocence which adults hold of children. For example, Ella posting a pouting selfie on Facebook may have ruptured the ‘boy initiated’ sexuality of her peers (Renold and Ringrose 2017), and therefore brought Ella a sense of joy. However, the source of this joy may be constrained by inadequate ideas Ella may have held about what her body could do in response to bullying, or what being feminine meant, producing sadness. This is not to malign the liberating potential of passive joys, as their affects move bodies towards ‘active joy’ (Deleuze 1988: 56), or a joy based on action. Through active joy, young bodies can become aware of and overcome the sad affects that diminish their capacities, and become filled with new ones. Active joys are based on ‘adequate ideas’ or ‘common notions’ (Deleuze 1988: 76), common in the sense that a new coherent sense of self develops (Ruddick 2010: 30). For example, a single virtual protest may become a pivotal moment for Ella: a new way of acting in the world. In turn, these common ideas can generate new understandings of the things that cause sadness, that is, the heteronormative gaze, and, as a result, Ella can increase her active joy further (Boundas 2010: 267). This chain linking joyful passions, to active joy, and from the formation of inadequate ideas, to those of adequate common ones, speaks directly to the ‘howl’ at children and young people’s containment. The ‘howl’ is a moment, or a series of moments, that expresses affective intensities through increasing a body’s compositions, and is therefore a sensorial expression of joy. However, any joy from howling takes place within the context of sadness; it is after all a howl at containment, and in response to an external action. To ‘howl’ is therefore an expression of passion, but as a passion it can become the starting point for change: for the formation of active joy and for new common ideas of what children and young people’s sexuality could be. These new common ideas of youth sexuality and gender would be based on whether an encounter generated good or bad affects, that is, joy and sadness, rather than on

Affective Atmospheres  137 whether encounters with sexuality and gender are virtuous (innocent) or deviant (sexual) – and where the innocent child becomes coveted and of transcendental value (Kincaid 2004). The basis for a new common idea of children and young people’s sexuality can therefore be achieved through the study of affective atmospheres, their durations, becomings and their joyful/sad affects. In order to explore how an ethics of affective atmospheres can work outside of the (a)sexual divide, I now draw on a sonic encounter and the atmosphere it generated, which occurred during the same project as Ella’s selfie.

Encountering the Howl Upon first reaching the rugby pitch, the young people and the research team were drawn toward the back of the field by a sound: the Howl. The following prose has been adapted from the audio recording of the fieldwork, and begins with our encountering of the Howl, and the conversations that followed. I have intentionally played with the style of presenting the transcript, in order to challenge the reader to move with the extract, just as the young people and researchers were moved in the moment: ‘Is that a dog?’ said Emma. ‘It is,’ said Sophie. ‘In the fence,’ said Ella. ‘It’s a dog howling.’ ‘It’s a husky,’ said Jacob. ‘If it’s not a husky,’ said Sophie, ‘it could be a lurcher, or something? ‘Like a hunter dog,’ said Ella. ‘Let’s go and see if we can catch it on tape,’ said Emma. ‘Who has got their voice memos going?’ ‘Me,’ said Michael. ‘So why don’t you take a picture and do a soundscape,’ said Emma. ‘Just keep quiet and you might be able to catch that weird wolf-dog sound. It doesn’t sound like a dog does it?’ ‘Yeah it sounds like a wolf,’ said Jacob. ‘It sounds human!’ said Emma. ‘It sounds like someone’s going Awoo,’ said Jacob. ‘Its call sounds like the call of a foxhunt,’ said Emma. ‘Awoo! Now we go up on the banking where the rugby pitch is, walking towards the sound of the dog.’ ‘It’s shut up now we’ve come over,’ said Jacob. ‘I know,’ said Emma, ‘maybe it knows we are here. Do you know which dog it is?’ ‘Dunno,’ said Jacob.

138  Ian Thomas ‘Did you get it?’ said Emma. ‘What is it?’ said Ella. ‘It’s something in there. It’s a wolf!’ ‘It’s a wolf,’ said Michael. ‘It come that way.’ ‘It’s a husky like,’ said Jacob. ‘A wolf!?’ said Sophie. ‘It’s probably a beagle or something. It’s not like a husky.’ ‘Where’s it coming from?’ said Ella. ‘Right keep quiet,’ said Emma, ‘keep quiet we’re going to catch it.’ ‘There’s a farm up by there,’ said Jacob. ‘It’s getting louder!’ said Ella. ‘It’s getting loud!’ said Sophie. ‘So,’ said Emma, ‘what do you think? Ian just said it felt trapped. What do you think is going on behind there?’ ‘It’s in it’s in a cage, or something,’ said Jacob. ‘It’s in a cage,’ said Michael. ‘Do you think?’ said Emma. ‘When we were rugby training,’ said Michael, ‘the hedge was all cut and there was a horse. He was, um, he was going nuts in there.’ ‘The horse was?’ said Emma. ‘Yes,’ said Ella, ‘they have a horse. They keep them all locked up they do. I wouldn’t. I’d leave them. I’d let them run around. I’d let him run around.’ ‘I love horses,’ said Sophie. ‘I used to have six.’ ‘I thought it sounded like a dog that couldn’t get out,’ said Jacob. ‘So have you not got six horses now?’ said Emma. ‘Oh no I used to,’ said Sophie. ‘She had loads,’ said Michael. ‘What happened to them?’ said Emma. ‘My mother passed away,’ said Sophie, ‘so I had to get rid of them. I didn’t have like anywhere to keep them.’ ‘So do you get to go on horses at all now?’ said Emma. ‘Um yeah,’ said Sophie, ‘my grandfather takes me to a riding school. And I go to SeaShore riding.’ ‘AWOO,’ said Michael. ‘You go to the beach,’ said Sophie, ‘and you ride in the sea.’ ‘Oh how amazing is that,’ said Emma. ‘So who taught you to ride?’ ‘Um,’ said Sophie, ‘well my mother. I’ve got a big family. All my sisters and brothers. I’ve got five sisters and two brothers and I’ve got two stepsisters. Well, um, they’ve all ridden. There’s riding on both sides of my family. My mother used to go riding and my gran, and on my father’s side, my auntie.’

Following Steve Goodman (2010), the Howl, of what seemed to be a wolf, contributed to an eerie atmosphere through its reverberations and sensation through/with our bodies. The sound changed our relationship

Affective Atmospheres  139 to the space of the playing field. Prior to hearing-feeling the sound, the group had dispersed to occupy the field. However, the Howl gathered us together, turning the deterritorialised space of openness and rustling wind into a territorialised area in front of the line of shrubs marking the edge of the rugby pitch, as we attempted to make sense of what we were hearing and from where. Being in the school grounds, in a space that is contained and constrained, whilst also having a history of excluding and ostracising these young people, the resonance and the composition of the sonic event with our bodies was more viscerally felt than it might have been in a different time-place-space. Our sensations in that moment led us to consider the Howl as a protest at the animal’s containment on the farm, and, as it reverberated through this study, the Howl formed a protest against children and young people’s containment. The atmosphere of the Howl generated a chain of ‘productive synthesis’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 5), linking up different elements within this encounter to produce further affects. The Howl connected up to the stories being told by the young people of their local area, one of deprivation and natural beauty; their various escapes from school and home, being in the wild; their desire to be heard. As a result, pastpresent-future were folded together, which had the effect of animating the young people and researchers to consider ‘life’. In that moment, the group started to consider the life of the animal and whether it was free or trapped. The howling animal seemed to call to us from the ‘outside’, bringing with it a sense of history, of entrapment and of being looked at, and in doing so it brought the research team back to considering well-being, which was at the heart of our fieldwork. On being taken up by the Howl, the young people talked about the treatment and freedom of other animals. Horses had been seen on the farm just beyond the school’s boundary, from where the sound seemed to emanate, and the young people expressed concern for their living conditions: ‘They keep them all locked up,’ ‘I’d let him run around’. From these recollections of trapped ‘Others’, via their own understanding of being trapped in school, the young people shared their various histories of horse riding. Sophie had ridden horses from early childhood, whilst Michael was just learning. For both Sophie and Michael, horse riding went back to different generations, from, for example, grandparents, mothers and now to them. Horse riding brought with it a sense of freedom, with Sophie particularly enjoying her riding school because they were able to go to the beach and ride their horses in the sea. Later on in our walk, Michael also told us about a friend who saw a foal being

140  Ian Thomas born: ‘the horse was going nuts . . . So he [Michael’s friend] went in to check . . . And it had the foal.’ The flow from containment (on the farm), to freedom and action (horse riding), to new life (the foal), illustrates the reverberations of the Howl as it entered into composition with the young people – and therefore generated joy. This sonic jostling led the young people to share their relationships with animals, significant others, moments of past and potential future joy from riding and being in the wild, and about life. Even Sophie’s outwardly sad memories of deceased loved ones came into composition with other bodies to form joyful lines of flight into action and movement. The significance of these disclosures, for Sophie at least, may have been in rupturing ‘domestic femininity’ (Renold and Ivinson 2014: 371). Rather than being docile, ‘girls-with-horses’ could be wild and engage a line of flight away from heteronormative ideals (Renold and Ivinson 2014: 371). However, for Michael, the admission of such feminine pursuits as horse riding, compared to a more ‘masculine’ bike riding, for example (Ivinson 2014), illustrates how the Howl generated an affective atmosphere where Michael was able to open up his gendered and sexual-becomings. Though bodies were both captured and activated by the sound, it also led to becomings that fragmented gendered and hierarchical divisions. For example, the Howl seized us all the same, boy-girl, adult-child, through its transfixing tonality. This atmosphere contrasts with that of other encounters during the same study, where these same divisions were reinforced and enlivened – between boy-girl, and adult-child. For example, both Ella and Sophie were often seemingly sidelined and ‘rooted in place’ (Young 2005: 41; original emphasis) by boisterous shouts and energetic boy-bodies. This ‘emplacing’ of the girls’ bodies may be illustrative of female bodily experience in contemporary Western society, as Iris Marion Young suggests: ‘To open her body in free, active, open extension and bold outward directedness is for a woman to invite objectification’ (2005: 45). However, rather than fixating on boys being active and girls being pacified, and the ‘binary subject positions of [girl] victim and [boy] perpetrator’ of children’s gendered and sexual relations (Huuki and Renold 2016: 765), the Howl demonstrates that binaries can be undone, if only temporarily.

Activating the Howl I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. (Ginsberg 2010: 848)

Affective Atmospheres  141 Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ speaks directly to bodies being destroyed by a madness that originates from their enforced conformity to societal norms. Society’s fascination with children, their innocence, therefore generates a similar madness through the containment of young bodies. Our idealisation of ‘the child’ has reached such levels that it has rendered us indifferent to children, ‘even those whose misery and devastation strike our eyes’ (Kincaid 1998: 55), their ‘starving hysterical naked’ bodies. Ginsberg uses (sexual) excess as examples that work against the madness of containment, and that activate the ‘Howl’: ‘waving genitals’, getting ‘fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists’ and ‘scattering their semen freely’ (2010: 851). However, subsisting within this excess, there is an appeal to joyful moments (van Engen 2011: 5). This chapter has taken up a similar call to explore intensity and joy through its experimentation with the concept of affective atmospheres, and thereby ‘howls’ at children and young people’s containment. As Kincaid notes, writing on the image of the child in contemporary society, ‘The child, the object of our gaze, is given little to do but enact the same old roles for our pleasure’ (2015: 8). When adults attempt to know children and young people’s encounters in the world through a ‘narrow and [hetero]normative sexuality that is individualised, genitalised and often familialised’ (Fox and Bale 2017: 13), they attempt to reaffirm the (a)sexual roles of children and young people. This chapter’s adoption of atmospheres moves beyond ‘narrow definitions of sexual and non-sexual’ (Fox and Bale 2017: 14), to explore durations and becomings that cannot be known beforehand. The study of atmospheres can therefore act as a new system of reference for youth sexualities by mapping out how children and young people’s material encounters in the world ‘become’ in the moment. The indeterminacy of atmospheres, that is, having to study them in the event of their unfolding, destabilises the sense of knowingness implied in the (a)sexual binary – which comes to pre-define what youth sexualities and bodies can do. However, as this chapter’s discussion of Deleuze’s writings on Spinoza has outlined, the study of affects also implies shifting from a (moral) system – where the ‘innocent child’ is of transcendent value – to an ethics that illustrates intensifications as ‘the absolute heart of the poem of life’ (Ginsberg 2010: 855). Ethical evaluations of children and young people’s worldly encounters are relative and partial judgements, based on their effects in generating joy and sadness, and cannot be dictated beforehand. The study of affective atmospheres in relation to sexuality is therefore doubly important as a way of ‘howling’ at

142  Ian Thomas c­ hildren and young people’s containment within the (a)sexual binary and as a process of learning about and living ‘life’ – to learn what causes pain (sadness) and joy. Though the tone of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ may be liberating, the conclusion of his poem poses a caution: I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free. (2010: 857)

Imaginary walls collapse, but those inside leave to the mercy of an ‘eternal war’. Rather than liberation into paradise, bodies enter into ‘yet more travails and constraints’ (van Engen 2011: 10) – leaving one stratum, only to settle on another. As a result, though mapping affective atmospheres can contribute to the ‘howl’ of young people’s (a)sexualities, it makes visible rather than resolving terrains of bodily struggle, and ‘it cannot determine an outcome’ (Ruddick 2010: 38). Howling against containment is therefore only a temporary escape, and the project of rethinking children and young people’s (a)sexualities cannot rest. However, through the adoption of an ethics based on affects, rather than a morality based on values, encounters and atmospheres that lead to the creation of joyful passions can be fostered. By fostering these small moments of joy, this can move each of us (adult and child) into an altogether different and more adequate idea of what children and young people’s bodies can do, opening up new gender and sexual-becomings, and therefore the active creation of joy in the world.

Acknowledgements The research team are immensely grateful to all of the young people who took part in the mAPPing study, and to the schools for their support. This chapter was developed from a conference paper given at the Royal Geographic Society Annual Conference 2015, entitled ‘“It’s a wolf!” The Howl, vibratory affects and the more-than-human in the schoolyard, and beyond’. I would like to acknowledge the other co-investigators on the project, Emma Renold and Catt Turney, with a special thanks to Emma for her guidance on early drafts of this chapter. I would also like to thank the editors for their patience and instructive comments which helped develop this chapter’s argument.

Affective Atmospheres  143

Notes 1. The young people’s names have been pseudonymised. 2. The mAPPing study piloted the use of mobile phone applications (apps) for data generation. The research team were drawn to the use of apps that might enable young people to capture aspects of their lived geographies, for example through images, notes and sound recordings. Funding was provided by the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD), Cardiff University, study title: ‘mAPPing gender, bodily well-being and affect in and through place’. The geography of the mAPPing study was a secondary school based in the ‘Valleys’ region of South Wales. The school was set into the side of a steep valley commanding views down and on to the main town, an area of deprivation bearing the hallmarks of its industrial heritage. The natural landscape of the study generated particular atmospheres, being visually striking and ‘wild’. 3. ‘Bodies’ and ‘body’ are used throughout this chapter to refer to collections of parts, with the biological body, as a collection of organs and processes, being one example of a body. 4. Feminine-becoming is used, rather than becoming-feminine, following the configuration of [noun]-becoming found in the translation of Deleuze and Parnet (2012).

References Anderson, B. (2009), ‘Affective Atmospheres’, Emotion, Space and Society, 2 (2): 77–81. Anderson, B. and J. Ash (2015), ‘Atmospheric Methods’, in P. Vannini (ed.), Non-representational Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 34–51. Blaise, M. (2009), ‘“What a Girl Wants, What a Girl Needs”: Responding to Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Early Childhood Classroom’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 23 (4): 450–60. Blaise, M. (2013), ‘Activating Micropolitical Practices in the Early Years: (Re)assembling Bodies and Participant Observations’, in R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 184–200. Boundas, C. V. (2010), ‘Spinoza + Ethics of Joy’, in A. Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 266–8. Buchanan, I. (2008), Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: A Reader’s Guide, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D.  W. Smith, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. M. Taormina, Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2006), Two Regimes of Madness, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2000), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (2012), Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum.

144  Ian Thomas Fox, N. J. and C. Bale (2017), ‘Bodies, Pornography and the Circumscription of Sexuality: A New Materialist Study of Young People’s Sexual Practices’, Sexualities, (last accessed 14 June 2018). Ginsberg, A. [1956] (2010), ‘Howl’, in C. Nelson (ed.), Anthology of Modern American Poetry, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 848–57. Goodman, S. (2010), Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Huuki, T. and E. Renold (2016), ‘Crush: Mapping Historical, Material and Affective Force Relations in Young Children’s Hetero-sexual Playground Play’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37 (5): 754–69. Ivinson, G. (2014), ‘Skills in Motion: Boys’ Motor Biking Activities as Transitions into Working Class Masculinity’, Sport, Education and Society, 19 (5): 605–20. Ivinson, G. and E. Renold (2013), ‘Subjectivity, Affect and Place: Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs to Explore a Young Girl’s Becomings in a Post-industrial Locale’, Subjectivity, 6 (4): 369–90. Jackson, L. (2006), ‘Childhood and Youth’, in H.  G. Cocks and M. Houlbrook (eds), The Modern History of Sexuality, New York: Palgrave, pp. 231–55. Kincaid, J. (1998), Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Kincaid, J. R. (2004), ‘Producing Erotic Children’, in S. Bruhm and N. Hurley (eds), Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3–16. Kincaid, J. R. (2015), ‘Foreword: Sweet Demons – and Us’, in M. P. J. Bohlmann and S. Moreland (eds), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 7–8. Mahler, J. (2008), Lived Temporalities: Exploring Duration in Guatemala – Empirical and Theoretical Studies, Bielefeld: Transcript. Mead-Brewer, K. C. (2013), The Trickster in Ginsberg: A Critical Reading, Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland. Ohi, K. (2004), ‘Narrating the Child’s Queerness in What Maisie Knew’, in S. Bruhm and N. Hurley (eds), Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 81–106. O’Sullivan, S. (2009), ‘From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Deleuze, Bacon and Contemporary Art Practice’, Deleuze Studies, 3 (2): 247–58. Renold, E. and G. Ivinson (2014), ‘Horse-girl Assemblages: Towards a Posthuman Cartography of Girls’ Desire in an Ex-mining Valleys Community’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35 (3): 361–76. Renold, E. and J. Ringrose (2017), ‘Selfies, Relfies and Phallic Tagging: Posthuman Participations in Teen Digital Sexuality Assemblages’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49 (11): 1066–79. Renold, E., J. Ringrose and R. D. Egan (eds) (2015), Children, Sexuality and Sexualization, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ruddick, S. (2010), ‘The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the Work of Negri and Deleuze’, Theory, Culture & Society, 27 (4): 21–45. van Engen, D. (2011), ‘Howling Masculinity: Queer Social Change in Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry’, Gender, Sexuality and Urban Spaces: Conference 2011, Working Papers Collection, (last accessed 14 June 2018). Young, I. M. (2005), On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 8

Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking

Chris Stover

Deleuze’s thought cannot but revolt the pedagogue who dislikes his irony, his humour, his gaiety, his endless games, and above all fears the uproar of chaos. (Villani 2006: 231) What combines nominal concepts and concepts of freedom better than a song? (Deleuze 1994: 292)

Music theorist Jonathan Kramer begins his influential volume The Time of Music (1988) with a quote from perhaps an unlikely source: cognitive science and AI researcher Marvin Minsky. Minsky writes, Of what use is music-knowledge? Here is one idea. Each child spends endless days in curious ways; we call it ‘play.’ He plays with blocks and boxes, stacking them and packing them; he lines them up and knocks them down. What is that all about? Clearly, he is learning Space! But how, on earth, does one learn Time? Can one Time fit inside another, can two of Them go side by side? In Music we find out! Many adults retain that play-like fascination with making large structures out of smaller things – and one way to understand music involves building large mind-structures out of smaller music-things. So that drive to build music-structure might be the same one that makes us try to understand the world. (Minsky 1982: 5; cited in Kramer 1988: 1)

Kramer describes Minsky’s ruminations as ‘whimsical’, and they are, marvellously so. He misreads Minsky’s point, however, when he characterises it as an account of how (or suggesting that) ‘time makes music meaningful’ (Kramer 1988: 1). How so? Partly because he could just as easily have arrived at the conclusion that music makes time meaningful, but more so because to assert that time makes music meaningful is to suggest that music does or can exist somehow outside of time; that time is a predicate or quality that can be added to music in order to vivify it. As Christopher Small insists, music does not exist outside its enactment

146  Chris Stover (1998: 6–9); another way to say this is that music is irreducible from its temporal extension, which is to say through the temporally constitutive relational forces that produce a musicking context – this is true whether one believes that music exists in time or that (musical) time is produced through the enactment of events; through the cut into future that Deleuze characterises as his third synthesis of time. Minsky’s whimsical suggestion is, rather, that through music children can learn about time. Moreover, they can learn about times: nested times, multiple co-occurring times, time as plural, as series of double relationships between pasts and presents, as multiple concurrent temporal enactments that impinge transversally on one another, as cuts into virtual futures. The implication is that music is a way to make these temporal conceptions particularly clear: not that music is a special kind of time, but that music is a practice that ‘makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible’ (Langer 1953: 110). That music is a practice will be a main theme of this chapter: music is something that we do, and therefore is essentially relational. When children play music – when they become-musicking – they enter into proliferating series of relations with other musicking bodies, with musical-objects-as-bodies, with active and passive lines connecting to virtual pasts and futures. Music, then, is a potent heuristic for developing an understanding of how time passes, which I will argue below (following Bergson, Keil and others) offers a temporal-relational pedagogical ground upon which other educational contexts can be built; that is, if we push Minsky’s suggestion just a bit further, time-learning through music might be one of the fundamental contexts through which an understanding of the relational world is developed. This amounts to a Deleuzo-Guattarian conceptual alternative in line with what Markus Bohlmann has critiqued as the teleological movement ‘up to adulthood’ (Bohlmann 2017: xiv) that characterises how we usually think of child development. As Minsky suggests, a child learns time by playing with and in it. In Portuguese, there are three verbs for ‘to play’: jogar (to play sport), brincar (to play a children’s game) and tocar (to play music). Spanish collapses the first two into the single verb jugar. French conflates all of these different forms of ‘to play’ into one verb, jouer; English likewise: in both cases the same word, therefore, is used whether we are playing football, cards, hide-and-seek or music. I find this conflation rich with potential proliferations of meanings, much like what results when Spinoza’s/ Deleuze’s affectio and affectus are represented in English translations as the single word affect, as a multiplicity. Most important, though, by bringing multiple registers together into the single word play, we can

Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking  147 consider from multiple perspectives what exactly it is that children do to ‘learn time’, which is to say that what we think of as discrete modes of playing might be revealed as flowing through one another: music might make time audible, but other forms of play make it visible or tactile. Music in this sense stands in for a range of practices or modes of playing. Etymological play is everywhere in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought; indeed, many of their most important philosophical-conceptual contributions begin by transposing a molar ‘State’ term into a lively molecular, minoritarian one through which multiplicities of meanings are inspired to proliferate. Arnauld Villani extends this concept: Just like the ‘is’ turns into an ‘and’ (le ‘est’ devient ‘et’), the monad into ‘nomad’, the ‘plain’ into ‘plane’ and ‘plateau’, ‘genealogy’ into ‘geology’ . . . in the same way we must reach the point where the ‘I’ turns into ‘play’ (le ‘je’ devient ‘jeu’) and paideia into paidia. (2006: 231)

For Deleuze, identity unfolds as the temporal enactment of a fractured self and the relationally constituted product of affective impingements. A child’s process of subjectification does not unfold as a teleological path, nor is it traceable to a single determinable cause; rather, it proceeds as a continual process of new machinic couplings, new assemblages engendering new territorialisations with new possibilities for enactments of new breaks and concomitant new reconfigurations. Villani’s radical suggestion transcends even this understanding of identity-formation as a complex relationally constituted plurality, to foreground play as a special class of intersubjectifying actions. Play, then, is not something children do (there is no well-defined child prior to the doing), but the practice through which they become who they are in the process of becoming. In other words, in Villani’s speculative conception, play is the practice through which subjects come into meaningful being. Furthermore, when children play, they play-with; play is the active affective space of becoming-with, it is one of the ways in which affective flows flow, through and by means of participatory actions. Music, then – as a series of acts of musicking – is not only a phenomenon that makes time audible (and therefore a mode of comprehending how time flows, and how different times interact and constitute one another), it is a playful relational activity through which identities are constituted. It is very important to clarify that those relations need not be – indeed, must not be – limited to relations between human musicking subjects. The subject-in-formation described above is far from limited to the humanly intersubjective, neurotypical or ‘normal’. When I perform music, in addition to co-creating with other agential human musicking subjects

148  Chris Stover (transversally with other performers, listeners, stage crew, and so on; temporally with composers, teachers and other double movements of pasts-presents), I enter into proliferating series of relationships with an instrument, with a space, with the sonorous materiality of the music itself (see Stover 2016, 2018). ‘To music’ is therefore also to enter into relationships with post- or prosthetic human (viz. my own humaninstrument assemblage) and non-human agents. Play is the natural purview of children. Everyone can play, but in an important sense to play is to become-child. To be becoming-child in a Deleuzo-Guattarian sense is to channel (or to reclaim) the sense of play that is lost as we become-molar through processes of socialisation and institutionalisation. It is, of course, at least partially through play that children learn socialisation; how they learn to become-with. How children play, and when and where and under what conditions or constraints they do so, figures largely in the particular modes of socialisation and institutionalisation that win out; perhaps this is how the Portuguese brincando (child’s play) is sublated into jogando (playing sport) in Western educational systems: the latter centred around the competition, goal orientation, strata of winners and losers, and structural hierarchies necessary for functioning in late capitalist society. Brincando, conversely, might be more like performativity in Butler’s sense: the actions children engage in as individuating subjects in (and constituting) relational contexts. The play of brincando, as a molecular practice, can also be quite deviant according to molar norms of socialised behaviour. And children don’t just perform, they perform for and with others with whom they find themselves in multidirectional flows of performative sensations, all performing-together, affecting and affected by one another through play. We don’t learn to perform, we perform to learn. Learning as play: the becoming-child of the child through collective practice.1 I have (perhaps unfairly?) painted jogando and brincando in dialectically oppositional terms, with an obvious implicit value judgement. What of tocando, playing music? Advocates for music education often point to added-value externalities of music-making: how it instils a sense of disciplined self-direction, builds self-esteem, teaches children to work together toward a common goal, fosters a creative attitude toward problem-solving (NAMM Foundation 2014; Allsup 2016).2 These are all important positions to continue proselytising for, since arguments for pure aesthetic pursuit (for example) tend to fall on deaf political ears, and since so many of these arguments circle around time and money: where to fit music, dance and art into school curricular

Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking  149 structures, and how to fund them. It is possible, however, that through a Deleuzian (and, we’ll see, Bergsonian) conceptual apparatus, we can develop another, more fundamental sense of the value of music-play for children and child education. To play music might be a way to subvert the sublation of brincando into jogando. But this can only be possible if we foreground the playing of play, if we resist the urge to transform musicking as a creative, relational, lived practice into one oriented around conformity, hierarchy and the re-presentation of works evaluated according to normative standards. This neoliberal model of winners and losers is too often the orientation in secondary musical-educational contexts. Play spills away in these cases; its essential molecularity sculpted into molar pathways. As the purview of children, play is in all cases a mode of becoming-child, and therefore is exactly the space within which molarising forces can be recognised, critiqued or kept at bay. Music brings this notion into relief in a powerful way. As Liselott Mariett Olsson (2009: 191–2) describes, play for children involves a collapsing of fantasy and reality into one another, which we might fruitfully think of as a creative exploration of the relationship between Deleuze’s virtual and actual. To play music does not mean to occupy or invent a fantastical space in the same way that, say, role-playing does, since music’s meaning is not found (at least primarily) in indexical-semantic relations but is immanent in musicking acts.3 Instead, music provides an imaginative space to play with virtual forces – creative, affective, relational forces – in ways that transform the actual in a very tangible way. The play of musicking, then, involves newly engaging the virtual forces immanent in the actual, as a lively practice that brings into clear relief how the actual is always already in a process of being de- and reterritorialised. But also, becoming-child has nothing to do with becoming recognizable according to the generalised traits of creativity, naivety, or fascination attributed to children, but instead, with commencing an indeterminate plane of composition upon which singularities might mix and coalesce into new formations unfettered from their association to a molar identity. (Wallin 2013: 210)

Children themselves are not molar individualities, nor is the concept of childhood; children are always already engaged in practices of individuation, any instantiation of which involves a becoming-actual of virtual forces through ongoing series of affective impingements, all animated through play. Neither are children simply wild molecular multiplicities that exist prior to coding or stratification. Children exist in and

150  Chris Stover partially define the contexts in which they find themselves, they are always already in processes of individuation, they already have agency even if it is not always fully or clearly directed. A child, we might say, is herself becoming-child, is caught up within a double movement of molar socialisation and molecular destratification, with the practice of play effecting that very double movement: the creation of modes of social togetherness (which can reflect State practices, the radical differentiation of Calvinball,4 or anywhere in between) and the exploration of virtual possibilities that continuously redirect the actual into new dimensional possibilities. To turn back to music and time, then: (a) how does participation in the play of music-making mark the event of a child’s becomingchild, and (b) how does this particular mode of becoming-child enact a relationship with (or understanding of) time-as-multiplicity? Bergson’s thoughts on how time proceeds offer some fruitful lines of inquiry. Aesthetic (including musical) experience, for Bergson, makes qualitative change – the difference-in-kind that Deleuze (1988) foregrounds – manifest, bringing into relief the double movement of qualitative differentiation/differenciation (and the co-constitution of virtual and actual that attends this movement; Deleuze 1994: 209) that rational, quantitative measurement obscures or experientially erases. Time is a key component in this process.5 As Suzanne Guerlac explains, it does this in part by ‘holding the future in the present’ (2006: 49) as a sympathetic being-with the act of aesthetic expression. Music ‘engages us to feel with it, it engages our feelings through an experience of qualities’. Erin Manning gives this a pedagogical gloss when she calls for ‘bringing back an aesthetics of experience where it is needed most: in the field of learning’ (2016: 44); this forcefully locates the nurturing of musicaesthetic experience in child-educational contexts. For Charles Keil (see below), this feeling-with is exactly where meaning is constituted: meaning is not somehow there in the music to be teased out through experience; rather, it is constituted as an expressive act through relational practices of musicking. Music-aesthetic experience involves a succession of feelings, different in kind, a movement through which involves a series of passages through different qualitative states. These states impinge affectively on one another, blurring into one another, reflecting the movement of qualitative change. According to Bergson, an accretion of feelings is not measurable in terms of a quantifiable increase in degree (as if through some experience I become 20 per cent more joyful, or turn the knob on my pathos meter to 11), but through a movement from one feeling-space to the next, all the while retaining

Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking  151 traces of the previous series.6 Perhaps most important for considering the movement of aesthetic experience is the moment of affective ­sensation – Deleuze’s dark precursor – which provides a bit of information about the immediate future, opening possibilities for different kinds of actions in a kind of pre- or transversal response, communicating across multiple heterogeneous series, expressed through multiple ongoing presents. ‘[E]very system contains its dark precursor which ensures the communication of peripheral series . . . Given two series of differences, the precursor [Bergson’s affective sensation] plays the part of the differenciator of these differences’ (Deleuze 1994: 119).7 This, it turns out for Bergson, is ‘precisely what characterises the flow of time itself’ (Guerlac 2006: 49) for the kind of experiencing beings that we are. So aesthetic feeling-with directs us toward what it means to feel at all (‘aesthetics teach us by changing how we feel’; Hickey-Moody 2013: 79); to feel is to live with an awareness of how time goes, to feel the cut of the living present into the future as affective sensation. If Bergson is correct (and echoing Minsky above), then it is through art – including especially music and dance – that we develop an understanding of time, which is to say an understanding of reality that precedes the distorting ways that quantitative measurement transforms that understanding. If, then, we are to understand reality as it actually is, we need that aesthetic orientation to provide a legitimate ground for all other inquiry! This, then, might turn out to be a more compelling argument than those typically proffered for why arts belong in schools. Bergson (and Deleuze and Guattari) focuses on the kinds of artworks that involve comparatively tacit experiencer-experience relations: observing the dancer’s graceful movements, listening to a melody (or to Messiaen’s birdsongs), watching a film or reading a novella. There are acts of play in all of these experiences, but there is a separation between performer and experiencer, even if Bergson is correct in suggesting that we co-create with the artwork by attending to the affective movement into each immediate future. How might we foreground play, as active, participatory co-creation? To reintroduce play as a participatory process means, first of all, to turn to contexts that emphasise collectivity, interaction and improvisation. It also means to bracket assumptions that there are determinable right ways to do art (including music) and open up the widest possible criteria for what gets to count as aesthetic expression. I turn now to the work of ethnomusicologist, educator, musician and activist Charles Keil to consider some of the social, pedagogical, aesthetic and political themes that emerge in this turn.

152  Chris Stover

Groovology The power of music lies in its participatory discrepancies . . . Music, to be personally involving and socially valuable, must be ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune.’ (Keil 1994: 96)

Charles Keil coined the term participatory discrepancies (PDs) in the late 1960s, to describe an essential aspect of musical invention and experience, and it has been an animating theme through most of his work in the ensuing decades. PDs are the little imperfections – the near simultaneities between rhythmic onsets, the beating phenomenon that happens when two pitched instruments are nearly but not quite in tune – that occur when people play music together. PDs are inevitable because of the fallibility of human precision motor skills. Much more important, though, according to Keil, is that PDs are necessary for music to feel good, which means for it to inspire participation. ‘If the microtiming is not right among the bata players the orishas will not descend. If the textural brightness and processual relaxed dynamism of the paired trumpets are not there a lot of polka dancers may sit tight’ (Keil 1994: 108). Discrepancies are a way in, a fissure in the contextual texture that invites one to join and contribute to the event’s unfolding, in whatever way one’s affect attunement suggests or allows. For Keil, the participatory nature of music and dance provide rich spaces for developing a participatory attitude, for getting into the groove and co-creating. Ever the punster, Keil draws lines of flight from PDs to ‘Particles Dancing’ and to ‘pleasure in the Public Domain’ (1994: 107). He stresses the communal nature of participatory artistic creation, and harshly judges musicking contexts where improvisational expression is disallowed or where an advanced degree of competency is required in order to be ‘let in’.8 Describing his experience working with university students on improvised drumming and dancing, Keil details some of the pedagogical techniques he would use to overcome hesitation or shyness and to encourage fearless participation. But then, I . . . realized that all this good fun was essentially remedial work. Important remedial work, but remedial; people could have all these musicdance-singing skills in their hands, feet, hips, and vocal cords by the time they are 7 or 8 years old. At 18 or 19 many people in this society are still ‘uncoordinated’, ‘unentrained’, ‘self-conscious’, ‘visually-dependent’, ‘over-specialized’, ‘gender role distorted’, ‘hyper-cultured’ and blocked in still other ways from full and easy expressivity. I put all these ‘blocks’ within quotation marks because I’m not sure they are so separable or so well named; at the moment they should be considered hypotheses . . . I have

Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking  153 come to believe that while it is true that anyone can get better . . . it is also true that it may take years of daily practice to feel comfortable in grooves that could have been acquired by osmosis in early childhood with almost no effort at all. (Keil ND(a): 21–2)9

It was largely this fact that led Keil to turn to early childhood education in order to develop a foundational locus for instilling a sense of participation through the play of music and dance. Keil has dubbed the study of the participatory aspects of musicking ‘groovology’ (Keil ND(c)). There are aspects of groovology – as a sort of humanistic science of participatory music-making and -experiencing – that foreground empirical research and detailed data analysis (see Prögler 1995 and Alén Rodriguez 1995, as well as numerous empirically oriented ethnomusicologists and music theorists since). Keil is most interested in how such empirical work corroborates what he sees as self-evident: that PDs are real, and that they matter. In fact, groovology is something of a stand-in term for an imagined future ‘Applied Sociomusicology and Performance Studies’ (Keil ND(c): 9) rooted not only in understanding music(king) as fundamentally a social practice, engendered in early childhood and nurtured throughout life, but also in developing a conception of musicking that is pedagogically rich in ways that radically transcend the local conditions of musicking itself. Groovology as a practice for a life, as an alternative foundation – of singing, drumming and dancing, with a particular locus in early childhood education contexts – for structuring new societal models. ‘The alternative musicology is simply helping people, especially very young people, to make music (play-sing-dance)’ (Keil 1988: 131). But Keil’s utopian aspiration transcends mere aesthetic pleasure: he also has a more radical pedagogical agenda, the pursuit of which he describes as ‘Paideia con salsa’ (Keil ND(b)). The word salsa stands in here for a vast array of Afro-Latin derived singing-drummingdancing assemblages that Keil believes are exemplary practices for reterritorialising early childhood education in pursuit of a new sort of creatively and ethically engaged citizen (hence paideia; more below). Keil suggests that we are ‘born to groove’, and that the best educational practices, especially for younger children, should be focused around singing, drumming and dancing collectively and improvisationally, and that any further discipline-specific teaching and learning should be built on this foundation of collectivity, creativity and play. Keil’s conception is Deleuzian through and through. Not overtly so, but replete with resonances. Among the most important are ­conjunctions between participation (as a collective expression) and affect, r­ elationality,

154  Chris Stover and (minoritarian) collective enunciation. Keil suggests that ‘continuous  and simultaneous expression of individual parts is a way of both being together and knowing each other, sending and receiving information and sensations at the same time’ (1987: 10), reinforcing how collective enunciations and processes of individuation inflect and diffract one another. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Keil eschews the idea that a child is merely an inchoate adult, or that an adult is merely the molarisation of a molecular child. Neither is a child simply an expression of genealogical forces, reducible to or explainable through structural archetypes. A child is on one level an expression of geological forces: of spaces and places and movements and transversal impingements of affective relationalities: [I]t is wrong to think that children are limited before all else to their parents, and only had access to milieus afterward, by extension or derivation. The father and the mother are not the coordinates of everything that is invested by the unconscious. There is never a moment when children are not already plunged into an actual milieu in which they are moving about. (Deleuze 1997: 62)

This is why the being-with of collective enunciations of music-dance expressions is crucial; it is through those movements – feet traversing floor spaces, lungs projecting air through resonant vocal cords, hands striking drum membranes or sticks hitting bells – that affective sensations are made material, that time is enacted. On another level, a child is ‘a metaphysical being’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 48), always already drawing new lines of flight to new becomings, living what I call a Deleuzian immanent transcendentalism (Stover 2017: ¶1.3) in which what is given (as networks of partial objects and relations) is constantly redirected or redeployed through double movements of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. ‘It is amid partial objects and within the nonfamilial relations of desiring-productions that the child lives his life and ponders what it means to live’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 48). This is one of the most important themes of Anti-Oedipus. The great argument of familialism is: ‘at least in the beginning . . .’ This argument may be explicitly formulated, but it also persists implicitly in theories that nevertheless refuse the viewpoint of genesis. At least in the beginning, this argument runs, the unconscious is expressed in a state of familial relations and constellations where the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic intermingle. In this conception, the metaphysical and social relations arise afterward, in the manner of a beyond. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 98)

Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking  155 But instead, there is no beyond, there is no originary child with a simple genealogy: children are always already implicated in the constitutions of their social and (non-familial) relational contexts, in conjunction with partial objects and machinic couplings. Contexts, therefore, matter greatly – contexts are lively products of affective relations. So the radical pedagogue’s fundamental question might be something like: how can we facilitate the kinds of playful, relational spaces that engender contexts within which (Spinozan joyful) affects can proliferate, where machinic couplings can multiply? Keil’s conception of participatory discrepancies is also DeleuzoGuattarian. When Deleuze and Guattari insist that ‘there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march’ (1987: 313), they are suggesting that the kinds of precise, micro-fascistic musical utterances that we might equate with military bands are antithetical to the kinds of expressive enunciations of the lived, improvised ritornello. Keil likewise: his work is punctuated with incisive critiques of the kinds of conductor-led, tightly scripted and choreographed ensemble music within which improvisation or individual expression is all but forbidden.10 Rhythm, for Deleuze and Guattari as for Keil, is lively, expressive, open to the affective sensation of the ever-new. This is the rhythm of children’s participatory, improvisatory, inventive music-playing. This kind of musicking (fusing brincando and tocando) is both a Deleuzo-Guattarian drive and a partial object par excellence. Drives and part-objects are neither stages on a genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure; they are political options for problems, they are entryways and exits, impasses the child lives out politically . . . with all the force of his or her desire. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 13)

The kinds of participatory musickings Keil foregrounds are DeleuzoGuattarian mappings, with multiple entry points, movements through which are paradigms of performativity. Musicking is a process of machinic coupling: an assemblage of musicking participants (human and non-), participating in the constitution of a context in conjunction with other participants and with the sonic materiality of music in the event of its utterance. All of this is brought to the forefront when children make music together. When children music. For Keil, we are ‘born to groove’, and through groove – through singing, drumming and dancing – we develop the capacities that Hallam summarises: we become critical thinkers, selfsufficient, we learn teamwork and to think outside the box. This is the trajectory of paideia, the education of good citizens, which for Keil takes

156  Chris Stover on ethical overtones: Keil’s citizen participates in a collectivist, progressive, activist milieu that subverts the hegemony of capitalist structures. Recall, though, Villani’s roster of Deleuzian movements, which concluded with a speculative transformation of ‘paideia into paidia’. ‘[I]t was in the name of paideia that Plato uprooted everything that could remind us, in one way or another, of chaos’ (Villani 2006: 231), in particular in the Phaedro, in which Plato casts aside paidia (free play) in favour of paideia (education). Villani and Deleuze turn out to be more radical than Keil in desiring to reintroduce chaos and free play as the practices through which one develops a life, free of paideia’s teleological ethos. As Villani suggests, philosophy, as the creation of concepts, is an art form; as such ‘it has no obligation to produce results (in this, it differs from scientific research and technique); it has no obligation to a contract of a moral order or to the respect of a certain decorum inside thought’ (2006: 231). Paidia, as opposed to paideia, is joyful, enthusiastically imperfect, perhaps a bit wild, but all prior to inscription of a moral or ethical singularity, prior to coding or signification. Thus, the sort of becoming-musicking that we should be striving for, in our child-educational milieus, precedes meaning-inscription; it is to ‘invent the rules and even to invent the invention of rules’ (Villani 2006: 232). For Villani, this is serious business: ‘it is serious, first of all – and this is not a paradox – because it is joyful . . . This entirely Spinozist joy is, first and foremost, an assent to the event’ (2006: 232).

Minor Musicking The body to which Deleuze refers is not necessarily human. It is a degree of power held within any given assemblage or ‘mixture’. Affects extend or decrease the limits of what a ‘body’ – or a given assemblage or mixture – can do. An affect, then, is the margin of modulation effected by change in capacity: a material section in its own right that articulates an increase or decrease in a body’s capacity to act. (Hickey-Moody 2013: 80)

For Erin Manning, to become-minor is to participate in an ‘active operation that creates schisms, in an ecology of practices, opening up the event to its potential for a collectivity alive with difference’ (2016: 6). To become-minor is, in a sense, to ask ‘what else?’: what else can an event do; what new modes of existence can be imagined? Manning asks ‘what if knowledge were not yet assumed to have a form already? What if we didn’t yet know what needed to be taught, let alone questioned?’ (2016: 9). In this query we find not only echoes of Bergson’s relational regrounding of knowledge inquiry through aesthetics (as a

Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking  157 move toward time-thinking), but also a tacit appeal to Keil’s groovological call. Manning’s way of framing the world begins with relationalities. Events are where relations occur; those relations radically transcend the merely human. Just as Villani describes how ‘man is not in a privileged position’ within ‘the play of the world’ (2006: 233), Manning offers ways to think past neurotypical frameworks, to move away from bodies-first orientations and toward movement, ‘incipient tendencies’, ecologies, duration, rhythm, resonances and intervals. As relational occasions, events must be tended. By doing so, we nurture the event’s potential for creative redirection; for Manning, as for Bergson, it is in the opening of the event on to its future potential that the germs of freedom can be found (Manning 2016: 22). Most important, Manning suggests that we turn to the movement-moving of the event, as sensation rather than structure, not only to find that germ of freedom (freedom from the molarising force of a predetermined structure), but to discover and nurture alternative, neurodiverse modes of relational existence; for example, the positive experiential potential of autistic engagement with the play of the world. This, for Manning, marks the occasion of the minor gesture within the movement of the event, and it is rich with creative, affective potential. Acts of musicking – enactments of relational, groovological timespaces – are in this sense pedagogically rich multiplicities. In music we can tend to diverse kinds of relational events: participation between active interacting human musicking bodies, of course, but also between bodies and instruments, and between agential human actors and the sonorous matter of the music itself. Manning asks us to move away from agency and toward agencement (2016: 134) in order to engage an array of relations with a plurality of bodies. As Hickey-Moody (2013) reminds us in the epigraph above, the Deleuzian body is not even a body at all in the conventional molar sense – it is a zone of affective movement, a product of relational forces, an expression of virtual potentialities, made actual through acts of relationality. When we talk about relations – about participation – in child education, we tend to assume neurotypicality as the foundation, the end-goal, or both.11 This is paideia, education toward a goal that begins, overtly or tacitly, with an assumption of conformity. Here are the rules of the game. (Want to invent a new game? Wonderful: what are the rules?) Here is your part to play – go home and practise and come back, and then follow the conductor carefully during our fifty minutes of music time. Music in this sense is an object, a work, and musicking amounts to a

158  Chris Stover teleological process of actualising the work. This can be a marvellous process of discovery with rich social-pedagogical-aesthetic benefits. But what if we go further, transforming paideia into paidia, seeking out the play in playing music, reorienting the act of musicking away from the discovery and production of a finished object and toward its trajectory in ‘the relational field of the occasion’ (Manning 2016: 28)? Musicaesthetic experience allows us to understand time in its true nature, as a multiplicity. To become-musicking – in any setting, but especially in child-educational ones – is to enact new processes of discovery that value relationalities of all types – neurodiverse, posthuman, nonhuman. It is in this way that, through musicking (through building and knocking down music-structures, to extend Minsky’s description), through the creative, rhythmic, affective movement of play, that children can ‘learn time’. This amounts to a Bergsonian regrounding of experience as heterogeneous multiplicity, as a sonorous movement of sensations engendered by the affective relationalities of human, posthuman and nonhuman musicking participants. The question that remains is: what would this kind of musicking look like – or, better, sound like? Keil’s paedeia is ‘con salsa’ – Keil finds in the singing, drumming and dancing practices of the African and Latin American diaspora the ideal space for creative, improvisational, participatory music-making, and in early childhood education the ideal context for developing the skills to participate confidently. But as Roger Mantie (2017) cautions, what of the cello player that finds the most fruitful affective expression alone with her Bach suites? What about the repertoire-based ensemble – the orchestra or choir or jazz band – that works toward a common goal but that elides the stratifying or molar or authoritarian overtones that Keil pushes so strongly against? If we are to truly celebrate the affective implications of participatory interactions between human, posthuman and nonhuman actors (thereby transforming agency into agencement), and their deployment for heterogeneous time-thinking as a foundation for understanding the world, then we certainly need to consider the ways in which any number of rich musical traditions can be engaged affectively, as play. I turn this question to music educators, then: how can we enter into any kind of musicking environment at all in order to nurture a relational ecology within which children from the most outgoing to the most insular, from across all imaginable cultural backgrounds and neurodiverse modes of relating to the play of the world, can contribute to the play of musicking; musicking as playing with time; tocando as path toward paidia?

Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking  159

Notes   1. But see above on how collectivity need not be with human others.   2. There are many additional ways in which music study has been shown to benefit other intersubjective practices; for example, it can ‘induce cortal reorganization’ in order to restructure the ways we process information (Hallam 2010: 270), enhance our listening apparatus in order to better ‘perceive and produce subtle phonetic contrasts in a second language’ (271), increase literacy and numeracy skills, stimulate ‘intellectual development’ (275) such as the competencies measured by the SAT and Stanford-Binet intelligence test, and much more. Hallam 2010 is an excellent starting place for finding where the most compelling contemporary empirical work on music in early childhood education has been published, and what its findings reveal.   3. In other words, meaning in music is not something that is there to be found, but is actively engendered through relationally constituted musicking acts.   4. See Villani 2006: 232 for a Deleuzian account of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes’s rule-bending game.  5. I stop just short of suggesting that time is the key component of qualitative change, since transversal relations across multiple ongoing present events also constitute the sorts of movements that Bergson and Deleuze would call ­differences-in-kind.   6. For example, ‘when we say our joy increases, what we mean is that it changes and becomes richer, the way a melody changes when it is picked up by different instruments . . . It does not really become more and more intense, displaying difference in degree, it just changes, yielding difference in kind’ (Guerlac 2006: 46).   7. This is a crucial passage for thinking through the relation between time and affect. Deleuze continues: ‘in this manner, by virtue of its own power, [the dark precursor] puts them into immediate relation to one another: it is the in-itself of difference or the differently different . . ., the self-different which relates different to different by itself’ (1994: 119). As the event of affective sensation that opens on to the virtual future, the dark precursor operates precisely by communicating across milieus, across multiple ongoing presents as now-enacted expressions of heterogeneous series of past events, each a series of qualitative differences-in-kind, predicated on and animated by an internal differencefrom-self. When Bergson writes of duration as a force (cf. 2001: 215–19) or when he describes ‘the continual progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances’ (1944: 5), he is referring to the power of the event, as an assemblage of temporal and transversal movements, opening on to future.   8. This resonates with Jeremy Gilbert’s position re Deleuze and music; for Gilbert, improvised music (to which I would add participatory music in Keil’s sense) emerges as a more fruitful space for examining music’s differential potential. ‘Musics which operate apparently outside of any framework of signification, generating flows of intensity and subverting the rules of artistic propriety which cordon off composers, performers, and audiences from each other, might be thought inevitably Deleuzian’ (Gilbert 2004: 121). See also Mantie 2017: 626 for a critique of Keil’s hard line in this regard.   9. Elsewhere Keil describes this as a ‘trained incapacity’ (Keil ND(b): 12). 10. See also Wallin 2010 for a prolonged engagement with this point. 11. Thus, in educational settings, autism is most often thought of as something to be corrected or overcome, rather than embraced; this is a theme that threads through Manning’s work.

160  Chris Stover

References Alén Rodriguez, O. (1995), ‘Rhythm as Duration of Sounds in Tumba Francesa’, Ethnomusicology, 39 (1): 55–74. Allsup, R. E. (2016), Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bergson, H. (1944), Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell, New York: Random House. Bergson, H. (2001), Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson, New York: Dover. Bohlmann, M. P. J. (2017), ‘Introduction’, in M.  P.  J. Bohlmann (ed.), Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. xii–xxx. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1988), Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Clinical and Critical, trans. D.  W. Smith and M.  A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gilbert, J. (2004), ‘Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation’, in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 118–39. Guattari, F. (2006), The Anti-Oedipus Papers, New York: Semiotext(e). Guerlac, S. (2006), Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hallam, S. (2010), ‘The Power of Music: Its Impact on the Intellectual, Social and Personal Development of Children and Young People’, International Journal of Music Education, 28 (3): 269–89. Hickey-Moody, A. C. (2013), ‘Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics, and Affective Pedagogy’, in R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 79–95. Jones, L. and R. Holmes (2014), ‘Studying Play through New Research Practices’, in L. Brooker, M. Blaise and S. Edwards (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Play and Learning in Early Childhood, London: SAGE Reference, pp. 128–39. Keil, C. (1987), ‘Culture, Music, and Collaborative Learning’, Echology #1, pp. 7–12. Keil, C. (1988), ‘Sociomusicology: A Participatory Approach’, Echology #2, pp. 125–32. Keil, C. (1994), ‘Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music’, in C. Keil and S. Feld (eds), Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 96–108. Keil, C. (ND(a)), ‘Blocks to Good Drumming’, M.U.S.E. Letter, pp. 21–6. Keil, C. (ND(b)), ‘Paideia con Salsa: Ancient Greek Education for Active Citizenship and the Role of Afro-Latin Dance-Music in our Schools’, M.U.S.E. Letter 2, pp. 10–15.

Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking  161 Keil, C. (ND(c)), ‘Groovology and the Magic of Other People’s Music’, (last accessed 15 June 2018). Kramer, J. (1988), The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies, New York: Schirmer. Langer, S. (1953), Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (Developed from Philosophy in a New Key), New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Manning, E. (2016), The Minor Gesture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mantie, R. (2017), ‘Leisure Grooves: An Open Letter to Charles Keil’, in R. Mantie and G.  D. Smith (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 619–38. Minsky, M. (1982), ‘Music, Mind, and Meaning’, in M. Clynes (ed.), Music, Mind, and Brain: The Neuropsychology of Music, New York: Plenum Press, pp. 1–19. NAMM Foundation (2014), ‘Why Learn to Play Music? Advocacy Brochure’, (last accessed 15 June 2018). Olsson, L. M. (2009), Movement and Experimentation in Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education, New York: Routledge. Prögler, J. A. (1995), ‘Searching for Swing: Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm Section’, Ethnomusicology, 39 (1): 21–54. Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Stover, C. (2016), ‘Musical Bodies: Corporeality, Emergent Subjectivity, and Improvisational Spaces’, M/C Journal, 19 (1); available at (last accessed 15 June 2018). Stover, C. (2017), ‘Time, Territorialization and Improvisational Spaces’, Music Theory Online, 23 (1); available at (last accessed 15 June 2018). Stover, C. (2018), ‘Affect and Improvising Bodies’, Perspectives of New Music, 55 (2): 5–66. Villani, A. (2006), ‘Why Am I Deleuzian?’, trans. C. Boundas and S. Lamble, in C. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 227–49. Wallin, J. (2010), A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallin, J. (2013), ‘Morphologies for a Pedagogical Life’, in I. Semetsky and D. Masny (eds), Deleuze and Education, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 196–214.

Chapter 9

Temporalities of Children’s Literature: Chronos, Aion and Incorporeal Ageing

Jane Newland

‘What is Time like, Uncle Alan?’ asked Tom. His uncle put his book down altogether; and his aunt nervously put down her mending, too. Philippa Pearce, Tom’s Midnight Garden

Questions of Time Children’s literature is rich with diverse, complex temporal structures and interrogations about the nature of time itself, as Tom’s questioning of his Uncle Alan in the epigraph above reveals. These are profoundly philosophical questions for a literary genre whose implied readership, children, has arguably little experience of the passing of time. This chapter firstly draws on two British children’s fantasy texts: C.  S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, published between 1950 and 1956, and Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958). In the latter part of this chapter, I consider Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, comprising five texts: Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975) and Silver on the Tree (1977). In these texts, many permutations on time are presented: C. S. Lewis allows his child characters to age in Narnia, but then returns them to their pre-Narnian child bodies at the end of his texts. Philippa Pearce bends and warps linear progressions of time in her extra-temporal midnight garden, whilst Susan Cooper suggests that other times outside normal time are possible. In this chapter, I read these texts alongside Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of Chronos and Aion. In the first part of this chapter, I consider the texts’ initial situations, of a controlled, regulated Chronos: an absorbing present essentially linked to concerns of the body. As these texts progress, so the textual Chronos is disturbed and the child protagonists are able to access a child-time free from corporeal limitations. This

Temporalities of Children’s Literature  163 child-time allows time to progress in rhizomatic and non-linear ways, and in the second part of this chapter I consider how this can be likened to Deleuze’s Aion. It is my contention that a Deleuzian reading of the temporal structures in these texts can help us reconsider one of the major preoccupations for scholars of children’s literature: the notion of growing up and ageing in children’s fiction. With Aion, we are no longer restricted by a uni-directional movement through time, towards a greater maturity and dominated by a directional preposition. Growing up in these children’s texts is surpassed by a notion of incorporeal ageing that heralds the coexistence of the presumed sequential regions of childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

Clock-time or Chronos In Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, Tom has been placed in quarantine with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen as his brother, Peter, has measles. Instead of whiling away his summer holiday climbing the old apple tree in his garden with his brother, he must see out his quarantine in their cold and empty flat. Here, Tom must bend to the adult clock-time of his uncle’s world where time is controlled and measured by the ugly kitchen clock which ‘always kept perfect time’ (Pearce 1998: 43). When his aunt and uncle discover that Tom is not sleeping well and is still awake and reading at half past eleven at night, they attempt to regulate time, meting out time as they take steps to restrict Tom’s bedtime reading to a mere ten minutes. It is in A Thousand Plateaus that Deleuze and Guattari position Chronos as ‘the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject’ (2003: 289), likening it to the ‘“pulsed time” of a formal functional music’ (2003: 289), or the perfectly regulated time of the kitchen clock. Chronos situates Tom firmly in his aunt and uncle’s flat, restricting his movement and limiting his time for enjoyment and forcing Tom to experience time as neatly measured units. Similarly, in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the first in a series of seven novels set in both this world and the fantasy world of Narnia, the Pevensie children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, have been evacuated from wartime London to stay with a mysterious professor in his rambling house. Their Chronos is also one of confinement, not because of illness, but because of the awful weather, which limits them physically and stifles their imagination. In both these texts, Chronos broadly aligns to what we commonly understand as the present: a ‘commonsense time of regular sequential

164  Jane Newland movement in a single direction, from past through the present to the future’ (Bogue 2010: 28). Deleuze writes early in The Logic of Sense: ‘Only the present exists in time and gathers together or absorbs the past and future’ (2004: 5), expounding this absorption later in the twentythird series, his most detailed account of the Chronos-Aion distinction: past, present and future are not three dimensions of time; only present fills time, whereas past and future are two dimensions relative to the present time. In other words, whatever is future or past in relation to a certain present (a certain extension or duration) belongs to a more vast present which absorbs the past and the future. (2004: 186)

Chronos absorbs the pasts and futures lying adjacent to it. The past is a former present, the future, a present to come, rendering Chronos ‘an encasement, a coiling up of relative presents’ (Deleuze 2004: 186). The ‘physical and cyclical Chronos of the variable living present’ (73) is an ‘eternal present’ (150), ‘inseparable from the bodies which fill[] it out’ (165), ‘limited and infinite’ (165) and ‘inseparable from circularity’ (165). Tom will be ‘cooped up for weeks’ (Pearce 1998: 3) with his aunt and uncle: a predetermined and limited quarantine period which nonetheless seems never-ending and endlessly the same to Tom. Similarly, the Pevensie children’s evacuation, whilst not permanent, has no immediate end in sight. The Chronos of these children is essentially tied to concerns of the body: Tom must be isolated to protect his body from disease and to avoid contaminating others; the Pevensie children are sent away from wartime London to avoid being physically caught up in the Blitz. The Chronos of the children in these texts is thick and monotonous and, moreover, corporeal. In each of these texts Chronos is interrupted, however. In Tom’s Midnight Garden, in addition to the ugly kitchen clock, another timemachine is present: an old grandfather clock whose ticking punctuates the monotony of the house. The grandfather clock is elegant and stately, but equally capricious: ‘The clock kept good time – its fingers were now correctly pointing to five o’clock – but it seldom chose to strike the right hour. It was utterly unreliable in its striking, Uncle Alan said. Moreover, the voice of the clock was so penetrating that he could even hear it being unreliable when he was upstairs in bed, at night’ (Pearce 1998: 6). The grandfather clock, this unreliable time-machine, is a reassuring, albeit irritating, presence for Tom in this strange environment, and he becomes accustomed to the clock’s striking of the hour as he tries to fall asleep: ‘Tom could not stop counting; it had become a habit with him at night’ (Pearce 1998: 15). Just as Deleuze, drawing on David Hume and Henri

Temporalities of Children’s Literature  165 Bergson, develops his thought on the undeniable relationship between expectation and repetition with respect to the tick-tock of the clock, by contracting the past ticking (A) and tocking (B) of the clock into a single tick-tock (AB): a single habitually repeated event, so Tom is drawn into such expectation listening to the repeated striking of the old grandfather clock: Seven! Eight! After all, the clock was the only thing that would speak to him at all in these hours of darkness. Nine! Ten! ‘You are going it,’ thought Tom, but yawning in the midst of his unwilling admiration. Yes, and it hadn’t finished yet: Eleven! Twelve! ‘Fancy striking midnight twice in one night!’ jeered Tom, sleepily. Thirteen! proclaimed the clock, and then stopped striking. (Pearce 1998: 15)

This thirteenth hour, which the clock appears to offer Tom to counter Uncle Alan’s logical reasoning about the number of hours in a day, interrupts Tom’s dragging Chronos and gives him the opportunity to stretch Uncle Alan’s requirement for sleep time, for ‘He could be in bed for ten hours, and still have an hour to spare – an hour of freedom’ (Pearce 1998: 16), and it is in this thirteenth hour that the garden from the past reveals itself to Tom. Similarly, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, instead of playing outside, the Pevensie children find other ways to amuse themselves in the professor’s mysterious house. Heading into the wardrobe in a game of hide and seek, Lucy discovers the land of Narnia, and meets and takes tea with Mr Tumnus, the faun. Her passage into the wardrobe, like Tom’s thirteenth hour, disrupts Lucy’s Chronos, and opens up a time apart independent from the time her siblings are occupying. When she returns to tell her siblings of her adventures, Lucy learns that no real time has passed. Her elder siblings, Peter and Susan, are alarmed by Lucy’s insistence that this other world exists and turn to the old professor for advice. Susan tells him: ‘Lucy had no time to have gone anywhere, even if there was such a place. She came running after us the very moment we were out of the room. It was less than a minute, and she pretended to have been away for hours.’ (Lewis 1980a: 48)

For the professor, this temporal anomaly is exactly what makes Lucy’s story believable. He tells Susan and Peter that if ‘she had got into another world, I should not be at all surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so that however long you stayed there it would never take up any of our time.’ (Lewis 1980a: 48)

166  Jane Newland Whether Lucy opens the wardrobe door or whether the old grand­ father clock strikes the thirteenth hour, the children’s ‘normal’, everyday Chronos is disrupted, allowing them to move from clock-time, regulated by adults or older siblings acting as parental figures, to a more malleable child-time. ‘Child-time’ is a term I borrow from Analisa Leppanen-Guerra and her work on the American artist Joseph Cornell. In her text Children’s Stories and ‘Child-Time’ in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde, she writes, ‘child-time’ is a term I would like to apply not only to Cornell’s work, but also to that of the Surrealists. When I do so, it is without any intent of implying that Cornell’s work or the work of the Surrealists is childish or immature. On the contrary, child-time was a powerful concept for Cornell, as it was for the Surrealists, because it stemmed from the larger avant-garde search for alternatives to bourgeois constructions of society. Children offered a distinct articulation of a model for time that was both ‘other’ and opposed to that of ‘adult-time.’ Rather than the adult-time of regulation, production, and quantification, child-time seemed to be closer to the spatial and temporal model of dreams – seemingly irrational, fluid, often open-ended, but operating along its own logic, using elliptical, rather than linear, patterns. (Leppanen-Guerra 2016: 5–6)

Tom’s child-time begins as he gets out of bed and goes downstairs to discover the midnight garden at the striking of the thirteenth hour. In the garden, no longer constrained by Uncle Alan’s requirements for sleep or by the impositions of ugly time-machines in the form of the kitchen clock, he meets a young girl named Hatty and, more indirectly, her three older cousins, Hubert, James and Edgar, and her Aunt Melbourne. Together, Hatty and Tom explore the rhizomatous garden: Hatty shows Tom its hiding spots, leafy tunnels, shelters and secret passageways to the meadow beyond. Every night when Tom visits the garden, he sees it ‘at many times of its day, and at different seasons’ (Pearce 1998: 45), and he soon discovers that the ‘garden-child-time’ and his Chronos do not progress in the same way: in the Kitsons’ flat Time was not allowed to dodge about in the unreliable, confusing way it did in the garden – forward to a tree’s falling, and then back to before the fall; and then still farther back again, to a little girl’s first arrival; and then forward again. No, in the flat, Time was marching steadily onwards in the way it is supposed to go. (Pearce 1998: 98)

Tom’s child-time in the garden goes backwards and forwards and is much suppler than his clock-time or Chronos. Whilst he is in the garden,

Temporalities of Children’s Literature  167 Tom’s own time, his Chronos regulated by the ugly kitchen clock, stands still, whereas time passes in the garden, but in rhizomatic fashion. Tom realises: he did not always go back to exactly the same Time, every night; nor did he take Time in its usual order. The fir-tree, for instance: he had seen it standing, fallen and then standing again – it was still standing last night. He had seen Hatty as a girl of his own age, then as a much younger one, and recently as a girl who – although Tom would not yet fully admit it – was outgrowing him altogether. In flashes, Tom had seen Hatty’s Time – the garden’s Time – covering what must be about ten years, while his own Time achieved only the weeks of a summer holiday. (Pearce 1998: 171)

This is the same realisation the Pevensie children come to in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when they all return to Narnia: Narnian time flows differently from ours. If you spent a hundred years in Narnia, you would still come back to our world at the very same hour of the very same day on which you left. And then, if you went back to Narnia after spending a week here, you might find that a thousand years had passed, or only a day, or no time at all. (Lewis 1980b: 15)

The disruption in their Chronos, in entering the other world of Narnia, in hearing the striking of the thirteenth hour in Tom’s Midnight Garden, signals the passage from clock-time to child-time or, in Deleuzian terms, the passage from Chronos to Aion. In the garden of the thirteenth hour, in the other world of Narnia, the children enjoy a particular relationship with time: they interact rhizomatically with time, conflating past and present, moving backwards and forwards through time.

Child-Time or Aion Having compared Chronos to pulsed time, Deleuze and Guattari liken Aion to ‘the “nonpulsed” time of a floating music’ (2003: 289) in A Thousand Plateaus, referring to composer Pierre Boulez’s compositions where ‘sections of regularly pulsed music in standard meters alternate with sections in which performers are free to execute their parts as they see fit, the conductor providing no regular pulse’ (Bogue 2010: 28). Aion is then non-regulated, unmetered, ‘a floating time of flux’ (Bogue 2010: 28). It is ‘what the grandfather clock had meant by striking a thirteenth hour: the hours after the twelfth do not exist in ordinary Time; they are not bound by the laws of ordinary Time; they are not over in sixty

168  Jane Newland ordinary minutes; they are endless’ (Pearce 1998: 181). It is in The Logic of Sense that Deleuze expounds upon the subtleties of the Chronos-Aion distinction. He writes: there are two times, one of which is composed only of interlocking presents; the other is constantly decomposed into elongated pasts and futures. There are two times, one of which is always definite, active or passive; the other is eternally Infinite and eternally neutral. One is cyclical, measures the movement of bodies and depends on the matter which limits and fills it out; the other is a pure straight line at the surface, incorporeal, unlimited, an empty form of time, independent of all matter. (Deleuze 2004: 73; original emphasis)

The first of these times is, as we have seen, Chronos, an absorbing, dense, corporeal present, weighed down with physical concerns and limitations: Uncle Alan’s time; the time of the Pevensie children’s evacuation. The second time, Aion, puts corporeal constraints aside: bedtimes do not need to be observed and child bodies are free to roam regardless of the weather. Aion ‘disinvest[s] itself from its matter and flees in both directions at once, toward the future and toward the past’ (Deleuze 2004: 73). This simultaneous past-future impetus distinctive of Aion helps us reconsider the physical and temporal anomalies that occur during the child-time of these texts and sheds light on the contradictions of the growing-up motif common to children’s literature. On their arrival in Narnia, the Pevensie children discover that the White Witch has cast an eternal winter on the land, ‘Always winter and never Christmas’ (Lewis 1980a: 23), freezing time and nature, and turning the creatures that live there into stone should they disobey her. The children’s presence brings about the thaw: the White Witch loses her freezing grip on the land, and the lion, Aslan, king of Narnia, is restored. The children then begin to grow up in Narnia, ageing and becoming themselves the Kings and Queens of Narnia, before being transported back to their Chronos, tumbling out of a wardrobe door into the empty room, and they were no longer Kings and Queens in their hunting array but just Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy in their old clothes. It was the same day and the same hour of the day on which they had all gone into the wardrobe to hide. (Lewis 1980a: 170)

Renowned children’s literature scholar Maria Nikolajeva describes such texts as carnivalesque, mixing circular and linear time to allow the child, like the fool at the carnival, to pass into linear time, becoming king or adult briefly. She writes:

Temporalities of Children’s Literature  169 carnival is always a temporary, transitional phenomenon – so is childhood. Like the carnivalesque fool, the child can temporarily, by means of magic or his own imagination, become strong, beautiful, wise, learn to fly, trick the adults, and win over enemies. The end of carnival means return to the everyday, but the purpose of carnival is not only entertainment, but a rehearsal of a future moral and psychological transformation. (Nikolajeva 2000: 136–7)1

In these texts, any maturation that has been possible in the interlude of linear time is, in Nikolajeva’s reading, negated by returning characters to their child selves at the end of the narrative. In the Narnia chronicles, the Pevensie children’s time in Narnia is, for Nikolajeva, ‘merely a “time-out”’ (2000: 128), and when they eventually return to Narnia, their previous growth is effaced, obliging them to ‘star[t] over and over again from the same point, until they are too old to be involved’ (Nikolajeva 2000: 128). The Deleuzian temporal perspective of Aion, however, allows us to free ‘growth from the necessity of linear chronology’ (Newland 2006: 136) and to reconsider this negation of growth. Indeed, queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton considers that ‘there are ways of growing that are not growing up’ (2009: 11; my emphasis) and puts forward the alternative of ‘growing sideways’, which ‘suggests that the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain at any age, bringing “adults” and “children” into lateral contact of surprising sorts’ (2009: 11). Markus Bohlmann also critiques ‘Western culture’s vertical command of “growing up” to adult completion’ (2012: 4) and takes up Stockton’s plea, requesting that we ‘instead implement . . . words and modes of rhizomatic movement as a nonteleological alternative’ to linear growth (Bohlmann 2014: 386). Equally, Anna Hickey-Moody suggests that ‘through presenting childhood in a non-teleological manner, as affect and collective subjectivity that zigzag across time, Deleuze invites us to reconceptualise what growing up might be’ (2013: 283). Reading these children’s fantasy texts through the perspective of Aion allows us to do just that: Aion shifts prepositional impetus of growing up and reclaims growth in children’s literature where many scholars perceive there to be none. Aion is time independent of matter and of body. The Pevensie children are projected forward to adulthood, growing-up, and are then drawn back to their child bodies, growing-down. This Narnian ageing is not the straightforward corporeal, chronological ageing that is inevitable and permanent on the uni-directional timeline of Chronos. It is not what Susan experiences in the last volume of the Narnia series and about which her siblings are so scathing (‘she’s interested in nothing

170  Jane Newland now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up’ (Lewis 1980c: 128)). This is ageing in Aion: fluid and disinvested from corporeal constraints. This incorporeal ageing is bi-directional, an ageing of the simultaneous pastfuture event; as Eleanor Kaufman writes, ‘in the realm of Aion, . . . [t] here is a movement in two directions at once, but it is not a movement of cancellation’ (2012: 111). Hatty, the little girl whom Tom meets in the garden, embodies the bi-directionality of Aion. She ages incorporeally, advancing in age and returning to a younger self on different occasions. Hatty’s fluid time and reversible ageing; the garden tree felled by the storm and then appearing upright once again; the Pevensies’ return to their child bodies: these are all negations of growth or reversals of time only from the perspective of Chronos. Craig Lundy, drawing on another figure from children’s literature and the character central to Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, comments that tomorrow will come after today just as surely as Alice will age corporeally as the days go by, but this is only true according to Chronos. In Aion, the incorporeal past is simultaneous with the incorporeal future, and Alice cannot grow without shrinking, becoming larger at the same time as she becomes smaller than she will be. (2012: 110)

From the temporal perspective of Aion, there is no ‘accumulation of chronological ageing in an ultimate maturity’ (Newland 2006: 130). The Pevensie children do not experience a dissolution of growth or a reversal of the maturation process, but rather an incorporeal growth. Like Alice, who ‘does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa’ (Deleuze 2004: 3), the Pevensie children grow up and down in Aion, ageing incorporeally, the implications of which we turn to now.

Contiguous Blocks To age incorporeally, to grow up and down and not merely in one direction through the time of Aion, requires us also to rethink the presumed sequential notions of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. As Deleuze comments in Cinema II: The Time-Image: it is true that these regions (my childhood, my adolescence, my adult life, etc.), appear to succeed each other. But they succeed each other only from the point of view of former presents which marked the limit of each of them. They coexist, in contrast, from the point of view of the actual present which each time represents their common limit or the most contracted of them. What Fellini says is Bergsonian: ‘We are constructed in memory; we

Temporalities of Children’s Literature  171 are simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity.’ (2013: 104)

As Tom discovers Hatty’s present-day identity, the simultaneity of these periods becomes clear. Hatty is, in fact, the elderly Mrs Bartholomew who lives upstairs from the Kitsons. In returning to her childhood house as an elderly lady, she revisits her childhood garden in her dreams. Tom’s longing for a playmate during his quarantine, combined with Mrs Bartholomew’s desire to revisit the garden of her childhood, creates the garden from the past, and the different scenes that appear to Tom depend ‘upon what old Mrs Bartholomew had chosen to remember in her dreams’ (Pearce 1998: 225). Although Mrs Bartholomew is dreaming the garden of the thirteenth hour into existence, her dreams should not be considered as stifling Oedipal childhood memories, for, as Deleuze states, ‘the Freudian formula must be reversed. You have to produce the unconscious. It is not at all a matter of repressed memories or even of phantasms. You don’t reproduce childhood memories, you produce blocs of child-becoming with blocs of childhood’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 78). Deleuze and Guattari contrast the limitations of Oedipal childhood memory fixed in time and which cut off desire with the liberating childhood block in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, writing ‘the childhood block functions differently. It is the only real life of the child; it is deterritorializing; it shifts in time; with time’ (1986: 78). The moments spent in the midnight garden are therefore not mere memories preserved in a fixed moment in time but childhood blocks: shared, collective experiences that encompass Tom’s present-day childhood, Hatty’s remembered childhood and Hatty’s present-day maturity and allow seemingly separate and distinct ages to coexist. The moments spent in the garden of the thirteenth hour surpass the need for possessive pronouns as they are neither uniquely Tom’s nor Hatty’s, sweeping up both child and adult into a block that endures across all time. The childhood block inject[s] the child into the adult, or the superficial adult into the real child . . . [T]he adult is captured up in a childhood block without ceasing to be an adult, just as the child can be caught up in an adult block without ceasing to be a child. This is not an artificial exchange of roles. Rather, it is the strict contiguity of two faraway segments. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 79)

In the garden of the thirteenth hour, the youthful Hatty, a child of both the elderly Hatty’s and Tom’s past, is joined by Tom, a child from the youthful Hatty’s future, who exists in the elderly Hatty’s present. Time’s arrow is no longer straight, moving logically from childhood

172  Jane Newland through adolescence to adulthood, but it now bends and warps itself to join pasts, presents and futures; childhoods, adolescences, adulthoods. Indeed, the temporal curiosities of the garden bring Tom to ponder these temporal distortions: Tom was thinking about the Past, that Time made so far away. Time had taken this Present of Hatty’s and turned it into his Past. Yet even so, here and now, for a while, this was somehow made his Present too – his and Hatty’s. (Pearce 1998: 148)

In the garden, the time of Aion reveals its labyrinthine properties which Deleuze describes as follows: Aion stretches out in a straight line, limitless in either direction. Always already passed and eternally yet to come. Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound its circle, stretching itself out in a straight line. It is perhaps all the more dangerous, more labyrinthine, and more tortuous for this reason. (2004: 189)

The time of Aion is not an ever-returning circle but a circle that has been stretched out to form an infinite line always encompassing both the past and the future at any given moment, as the following episode from Tom’s Midnight Garden demonstrates. As the quarantine draws to an end, the season in the garden changes to winter and Tom finds a maturing Hatty skating on the frozen river. She inquires as to why he does not have skates of his own, and in his longing to join her, Tom has ‘one of the most daring ideas he had ever had’ (Pearce 1998: 175). Tom makes Hatty promise to change where she keeps her skates, asking her to move them to ‘that secret place you showed me in your bedroom cupboard, under the floorboards’ (Pearce 1998: 176), ‘a tactic that at its most utilitarian allows him to use history as a kind of safety-deposit box, hiding objects in one age only to rediscover them in a later one’ (Butler 2006: 63–4). On his return to his bedroom in his Chronos, Tom discovers the hidden skates from his Aion. The time-travelling skates, left in the past by the youthful Hatty, are retrieved in Tom’s present, and worn in the youthful Hatty’s future, her maturity. The following night, accompanying Hatty on her skating trip, he wears the ice skates Hatty had left for him, creating the situation of ‘two skaters on one pair of skates, which seemed to Tom both the eeriest and the most natural thing in the world’ (Pearce 1998: 190). In doing so, Tom connects past and future and combines Hatty’s childhood and adulthood in one contiguous block existing across all time.

Temporalities of Children’s Literature  173 Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence blends Arthurian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon legend. In this sequence, Chronos is represented by the mortal children Jane, Simon and Barney Drew from the present day, who appear in the first, third and final novels alongside their GreatUncle Merry, Merriman Lyon, in a quest to find the Holy Grail. In the second and fourth texts, the Drew children’s Chronos mixes with the timestreams of the Old Ones who ‘are planted only loosely within Time’ (Cooper 1982a: 64) as they take part in an epic struggle between Light and Dark. In the second novel, The Dark Is Rising, Will Stanton learns, as he comes of age on his eleventh birthday, that he is the last of a circle of Old Ones to be born, and Merriman Lyon, who is in fact the first Old One and who ‘belong[s] nowhere and everywhere’ and has been ‘in every age’ (Cooper 1982a: 113), joins Will in his initiation into the Circle of Old Ones which ‘spans both time and space’ (Drout 1997: 232). The Old Ones exemplify the nature of Aion, as Merriman confirms when he counsels Will that ‘all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future’ (Cooper 1982a: 64).2 Will’s learning requires him to be transported to the nineteenth century to read the Book of the Gramarye guarded by the swinging pendulum of a grandfather clock, and ‘by reading a single line he is actually transported to the place and time he is to study and thus learns the secrets of the Old Ones through a kind of passive implantation of knowledge’ (Drout 1997: 238). Like the garden of the thirteenth hour, this object from outside of time is guarded by a time-machine. Will’s condensed learning, his ‘long lifetime of discovery and wisdom [is] given to him in a moment of suspended time’ (Cooper 1982a: 138). Will gradually begins to realise the powers of Light and Dark in relation to time: after reading the Book of the Gramarye, Will realises that he and Merriman are not in time as he has always known it. He states: ‘we are not in real time; at least, we are in past time, and even that we seem to be able to stretch as we wish, to make it go fast, or slow’ (Cooper 1982a: 123–4). Will realises that as an Old One ‘he inhabit[s] a different time-scale from that of everyone he ha[s] ever known or loved’ (Cooper 1982a: 138) and as an Old One he can bring objects and even people forwards or backwards in time. In The Dark Is Rising Will has to reunite the signs of the Light. In his quest for the fifth sign, a mandala made out of wood, Will is shown its creation and renewal during his time-slip into the nineteenth century, where it is then hidden so that he can retrieve it in his own time, the twentieth century, just as Tom retrieves the skates hidden by Hatty. The Old Ones, then, tend to treat time with a certain expediency, and Will also begins to realise that, as

174  Jane Newland an Old One, not only can he stretch and warp time and use it to his own advantage, but there is a separate time plane, outside time. He remarks in conversation with Mr Beaumont, the village rector, that ‘everything that matters is outside Time. And comes from there and can go there’, adding: ‘I mean the part of all of us, and of all the things we think and believe, that has nothing to do with yesterday or today or tomorrow because it belongs at a different kind of level. Yesterday is still there, on that level. Tomorrow is there too.’ (Cooper 1982a: 164–5)

The circle of the Old Ones thus represents the decentred circle of Aion, detached from and yet stemming from Chronos, bringing yesterday and tomorrow into contact with each other on its tortuous, labyrinthine line. The Aion of Narnia, of the midnight garden and of the Old Ones is not impervious to the presence of Chronos, however. Indeed, whilst in some respects Aion is distinct from Chronos, ‘the two only appear in mixtures, as coexisting temporal realities’ (Bogue 2010: 96), or, as James Williams writes, it is never that we have only the present, or only the past, or only the future, with other times as lesser dimensions. It is never that we have only Chronos or only Aiôn. Instead, all of these times coexist and together provide a complete view of time irreducible to any one of its elements or to an overall rule for their articulation. (2011: 140)

The garden has its own time-machine in the form of a sundial: an ominous presence, for ‘the sight of the sundial, even without the sun upon it yet, . . . remind[s Tom] again of the passing of time’ (Pearce 1998: 40). Albeit defunct in the moonlight, the sundial brings back the thoughts of Chronos to Tom, of the inevitability of chronological, corporeal ageing and the passing of his childhood. As a result, Tom is increasingly torn between his desire to remain in the garden and his desire to return home to his family. This temptation to remain in the garden is not without risk. During the skating excursion, Tom’s brother, Peter, missing his daily letter, dreams himself to join Tom, and points out that Hatty is not the little girl of his letters but a grown woman (Pearce 1998: 197); it is at this moment that Tom begins to realise that he hasn’t mastered Time, that his passage into Aion cannot be permanent, for, if it is, his chronological ageing on his own timeline of Chronos will cease. In Narnia, the Pevensie children risk a similar fate, namely, of being turned into stone and trapped in a never-ending childhood, should they not defeat the White Witch. They avoid this fate

Temporalities of Children’s Literature  175 in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but succumb to it in The Last Battle as a train accident kills them all, except Susan, whose tempting Chronos of lipstick and nylons calls to her and keeps her from entering Aion permanently. In The Grey King, Will travels to Wales and meets Bran, a strange, pale boy, and his dog. When the Dark is defeated, in the final instalment of the sequence Silver on the Tree, the Old Ones return to their place outside time and Bran must decide whether to join King Arthur, his father, outside chronological time. Merriman3 counsels him: ‘if you give up your place in the High Magic, your identity in the time that is outside Time, then you will be no more than mortal, like Jane and Simon and Barney here. You will be the Pendragon no longer, ever. You will remember nothing that has happened, you will live and die as all men do. You must give up all chance of going out of Time with those of the Light – as I shall go before long, and as one day long hence Will will go too.’ (Cooper 1982b: 279)

Bran chooses the mortal world, realising that the strength of the emotional bonds that he has with the people of his growing world supersede even the highest magic. These texts do not, then, promote Aion over and above Chronos. Instead, they reveal how Chronos and Aion inhere in each other to form childhood blocks that affect children and adults alike.

Conclusion: Incorporeal Ageing In the fantasy texts of Philippa Pearce, C. S. Lewis and Susan Cooper, there is a shift from clock-time to child-time; from a thick, corporeal Chronos of the child protagonists’ present situations to a fluid and malleable, incorporeal temporal realm of Aion. In these texts, the fantasy elements of a capricious clock striking an improbable thirteenth hour, a wardrobe opening on to another world, and an atemporal discovery on an eleventh birthday trigger this move from Chronos to Aion. Whereas traditional approaches to children’s literature dismiss such texts on the grounds that they negate growth and development, the Deleuzian concept of Aion allows us to reconsider what this growth should be. In the fantasy realms of Aion, the child protagonists are able to divest themselves from purely linear time progressions and are able to move rhizomatically within time. Their ageing or growth therefore moves away from a purely corporeal growth and a purely chronological ageing to an incorporeal growth. This is ageing but without bodily concerns. This is not merely growing up, but growing on the labyrinthine and

176  Jane Newland c­onnectable line of Aion, which can be in any direction, allowing us to be young and old at any point in time. In the Aion of these texts, governed by a past future impetus, the child figure can be simultaneously the child one is and the adult one will become; the adult one is with the child one was. Aion also impacts how we consider the notions of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. In Aion, these are no longer a succession of mutually exclusive periods in contact with each other only through the movement from one to the next, but rather blocks which inhere within each other and which traverse all time. Childhood need no longer be considered as a transitional, temporary phenomenon or a period that will be forever lost to us as adults, but as a block that coexists in all ages across time and that can encompass adults and children alike. Just as childhood inheres in time, so Chronos inheres in Aion and Aion in Chronos. Bodily, chronological ageing and growth is inevitable, but only from the limited perspective of a uni-directional Chronos. Equally, we cannot long for a permanent state of child-time or Aion, as this would mean a complete dissolution of Chronos. We can have and need to have both, as these children’s fantasy texts show: incorporeal ageing on the unlimited line of Aion deflects us from and enriches our corporeal, chronological ageing.

Notes 1. In her seminal text From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature, Nikolajeva investigates the progression of time and its related notion of growing up in narrative children’s fiction, and puts forward two distinct views of time, chronos and kairos, similar to Mircea Eliade’s profane and sacred time. For Nikolajeva, kairos is the time of myth, which is reversible and repetitive and in which the characters are brought full circle back to their place of origin at the end of the text, such as the characters from series fiction like the Famous Five or Nancy Drew. The repetition present in these texts is Nietzschean in nature: a never-ending circle of the returning same. Nikolajeva’s chronos, alternatively, is measurable, progressive linear time. For Nikolajeva, when ‘Circular time opens into linearity . . . death becomes a central theme. Harmony gives way to chaos. The social, moral, political, and sexual innocence of the child is interrogated’ (2000: 259). She proposes three categories of children’s fiction: prelapsarian, carnivalesque and postlapsarian. Prelapsarian or utopian, magical texts introduce the sacred and are governed by kairos, and are thus able to overcome the fear of ageing and death because in the kairos all is reversible. Postlapsarian texts ‘take the character beyond the point of no return, agonizing as it may be, introduce them and the young readers to the inevitable Fall, a definite departure from innocence and entrance into adulthood, which includes sexuality and procreation as indispensable constituents’ (Nikolajeva 2000: 263). I have argued elsewhere that even such repetitive and circular texts as the Nancy Drew or Famous Five series can demonstrate growth (see Newland 2013).

Temporalities of Children’s Literature  177 2. Both Lisa Sainsbury and Charles Butler recognise the importance of contemporaneous scientific works on the production of children’s literature. Sainsbury writes: ‘Movements backwards and forwards in time have become increasingly popular since the early twentieth century, when a number of scientific theories, such as Einstein’s “Special Theory of Relativity” (1905) and J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927) . . . attracted public attention’ (2014: 191). Butler also indicates that ‘Cooper may well have had Dunne’s theories in mind, too, when she made Merriman declare in The Dark Is Rising that “all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future”’ (Butler 2006: 76–7). 3. In Silver on the Tree, Arthur refers to Merriman as ‘my lion’ (Cooper 1982b: 253), positioning him as his Merlin.

References Bogue, R. (2010), Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bohlmann, M. P. J. (2012), ‘Moving Rhizomatically: Deleuze’s Child in 21st Century American Literature and Film’, PhD thesis, University of Ottawa; available at (last accessed 18 June 2018). Bohlmann, M. P. J. (2014), ‘In Any Event: Moving Rhizomatically in Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 39 (3): 385–412. Butler, C. (2006), Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper, Oxford: Scarecrow Press Inc. Cooper, S. (1982a), The Dark Is Rising, Reading: Puffin Books. Cooper, S. (1982b), Silver on the Tree, Reading: Puffin Books. Deleuze, G. (2004), The Logic of Sense, ed. C. V. Boundas, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2013), Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polen, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2003), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (2007), Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press. Drout, M. D. C. (1997), ‘Reading the Signs of Light: Anglo Saxonism, Education, and Obedience in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 21 (2): 230–45. Hickey-Moody, A. C. (2013), ‘Deleuze’s Children’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45 (3): 272–86. Kaufman, E. (2012), Deleuze, The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leppanen-Guerra, A. (2016), Children’s Stories and ‘Child-Time’ in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Lewis, C. S. (1980a), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Glasgow: Collins. Lewis, C. S. (1980b), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Glasgow: Collins. Lewis, C. S. (1980c), The Last Battle, Glasgow: Collins.

178  Jane Newland Lundy, C. (2012), History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Newland, J. (2006), ‘Difference Reading: A Deleuzian Analysis of Contemporary French Series Fiction for Adolescents’, PhD thesis, University of Southampton; available at (last accessed 18 June 2018). Newland, J. (2013), ‘Repeated Childhood Pleasures: Rethinking the Appeal of Series Fiction with Gilles Deleuze’, International Research in Children’s Literature, 6 (2): 192–204. Nikolajeva, M. (2000), From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Books, Oxford: Scarecrow Press Inc. Pearce, P. (1998), Tom’s Midnight Garden, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sainsbury, L. (2014), ‘Chronotopes and Heritage: Time and Memory in Contemporary Children’s Literature’, in C. Butler and K. Reynolds (eds), Modern Children’s Literature: An Introduction, New York: Palgrave, pp. 187–201. Stockton, K. B. (2009), The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Williams, J. (2011), Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Chapter 10

Deleuze, Children and Worlding

Markus P. J. Bohlmann

Children Children and adults have come to inhabit two separate though related worlds. Children, understood as adults-in-the-making, occupy the realm of childhood that they are supposed to leave behind as they enter the realm of adulthood. Yet the adult seems to be more entangled in childhood and notions of the child, given the continuity of a developmental trajectory where the child and childhood continue to live on in the adult albeit in the form of an inner child. The child and childhood, then, are not left behind, but they are filled with projections of memories and fantasies of a past which perhaps never was the way the adult remembers and imagines it to have been, but to which children nevertheless must live up. A parent’s wish that his or her child may have it better, that his or her child may live in a better world, often fails to actualise, in particular due to those entanglements in which children are caught up and which stifle their attempts at crafting a world outside the adult’s control and steering. The hope for children, then, becomes a deferred one, that once they have grown up and out of childhood, the world awaits – if they make it to this point and if they are able to let go of their own entanglements in and inheritance of an adult world that retains them in its patterns and parameters that they have adopted, (re)creating a world of oneness in which a child’s world is tenderly nestled. That this inheritance includes the teleology of growing up provides the child with a thought system that posits growth as the successful passage of developmental stages throughout chronological time, which appraises the child’s passaging and acquisition of a mind-set in line with the adult’s. The child here is monitored precisely because the adult is still caught up in childhood and notions of the child, where the child’s pursuit of a world different from the adult’s challenges the ­latter’s investment

180  Markus P. J. Bohlmann in his or her own world so deeply rooted in notions of the child and childhood, even dependent on the child for its definition.1 This rootedness in the child and in childhood stems mainly from the discourse of psychoanalysis in which the child has made its predominant appearance in the twentieth century.2 Here, as Sigmund Freud would have it, the child is Father to the man, explaining and being the raison d’être of the adult ‘because the psychoanalytic account of the human subject is that of a subject who was once (and continues unconsciously to be) a child’ (Blum 1995: 8). The child is the stable ground upon which an adult identity is built. The child and childhood are therefore not left behind and brought to a close, but linger in the adult, in the form of an inner child, a wounded one, who is waiting to be healed by going down a memory lane of Freudian cobblestone, which once more roots the adult in constructions of the child and childhood.3 The child worlds the adult, and the adult worlds the child. Accounts of children therefore become dubious to the extent that it is an adult lens that glances into childhood and onto the child, confusing an adult perspective with the ‘reality’ of children, whatever it is. The inquiry into childhood is led from an adult perspective licensed by previous childhood experience and the adult’s tacit confidence in privileged insight into this ‘space’ we all once inhabited. [However,] [i]n the effort to present the ‘reality’ of the child and its perceptions, we cannot help but interpret ourselves through the child. The study of the child thus becomes a perpetual re-enactment of the suppression of the actual child in favour of adult imperatives. (Blum 1995: 4–5; original emphasis)

Given these cross-generational introspections and misperceptions, the question arises whether Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as adult philosophers, are as presumptuous in their depiction of children and childhood as those poststructuralist theorists claiming to ‘unveil miraculously the “real” child, hitherto perceived through the dark glass of adult distortions’ (Blum 1995: 10). Do they present to us the ‘real’ child who, this time, is all about becoming soon to be obstructed by the adult who is all about being? Is their child soon to be striated and overcoded by an adult world and the parameters that govern it? Is their child more liberated than the adult? Does their philosophy necessitate the child to be about becoming for it to work? Claudia Castañeda finds the philosophers at fault since they, too, disregard the actual child and pen their philosophy of becoming through the child, who is once more figured as incomplete and pliable, and thus as capable of becoming. The

Deleuze, Children and Worlding  181 philosophers participate in what Castañeda observes to be a repeated cultural ‘conceptualization of the child as a potentiality rather than an actuality, a becoming rather than a being: an entity in the making’ (Castañeda 2002: 1). Here, the category ‘child’ seems to carry with it an unmistakable and incontrovertible fact: a child is by definition not yet that which it alone has the capacity to become. It is in this unique capacity, in this potential . . . that the child’s availability – and so too its value as a cultural resource – lies. (Castañeda 2002: 1)

It is the availability of the child figured as potentiality and as a pliable entity, which, ‘in turn, plays a unique and constitutive role in the (adult) making of worlds, particularly the worlds of human nature and human culture’ (Castañeda 2002: 1). The child worlds adult worlds in that ‘each figuration of the child not only condenses particular material-semiotic practices, but also brings a particular version of the world into being’ (Castañeda 2002: 4). Turning once more to the child as an entity-in-themaking, Deleuze and Guattari thus partake in an adult worlding through the child where the child worlds their (adult) philosophy of becoming. Turning to a passage in A Thousand Plateaus that reads: ‘The girl and the child do not become; it is becoming itself that is . . . a child. The child does not become an adult . . . the child is the becoming-young of every age’ (cited in Castañeda 2002: 144; ellipses by Castañeda), Castañeda claims that Deleuze and Guattari deny children their own experience, reducing them to a pure figurative status that depicts children not as persons with their own forms of embodiment, history, and location, but rather as the condition of becoming itself. Not only does the child not become the adult in this formulation, but the child is only figured as a form that can be inhabited by persons of every age. To ‘become-young,’ in these terms, is to take the form of the child, which in turn is defined as a condition of becoming (rather than being). (Castañeda 2002: 146)

The child becomes a figure to be utilised and to be inhabited. Deleuze and Guattari ‘use the figure of the child as a site of possibility from which the (adult) subject gains the capacity for transformative change, while the child as an embodied entity that might itself be realized disappears altogether’ (Castañeda 2002: 149). The child is emptied out of embodied experience and becomes purely functional to the extent where the child is being ‘figured only as a form of becoming’, that is, as a ‘pure form to be inhabited’ where ‘to inhabit the child, then, is to inhabit the condition, once again, of possibility itself. To inhabit the condition of possibility is to become a child’ (Castañeda 2002: 147,

182  Markus P. J. Bohlmann 146; original emphasis). The child’s availability as a pure form and a site of possibility renders the child once again subservient to the adult, offering ease and release to the adult. The philosophers ‘return to the child as a space that is, in a sense, free, or at least more free from this subjection’ to subject formation, where ‘the child remains a theoretical resource, insofar as it is continually figured as the site of the subject’s origin, whether the origin in question is natural or cultural’ (Castañeda 2002: 167; original emphasis). The child, once again, worlds an adult philosophy based on the child’s figuration as an entity-in-the-making where the child-in-its-becoming is Father to Deleuze and Guattari and their philosophy fathered through the child. However, the child remains Father to the man insofar as childhood and the child have not received closure and continue to live on inside the man. The child, for Deleuze and Guattari, is therefore an entity that is complete and that is placed in adjacency to the man – and the child – rather than inside the man.4 This adjacency of the child opens up the possibility of becoming for the child and the man by forming childhood blocks. Those blocks differ from childhood memories in that they do not bind the adult to the child and to childhood, nor is the child producing binding childhood memories. Deleuze and Guattari observe that ‘children don’t live as our adult memories would have us believe, nor as their own memories, which are almost simultaneous with their actions, would have them believe’ (1986: 79). With childhood memories predominantly belonging to the adult and to the parents of the child in the form of a past that binds them to the child and childhood, Deleuze and Guattari remark that ‘the childhood block is elsewhere, in the highest intensities that the child constructs with his sisters, his pal, his projects and his toys, and all the nonparental figures through which he deterritorializes his parents every chance he gets’ (1986: 79). Rather than binding, blocks are connecting and/but diverging. This does not mean that the child ‘cease[s] reterritorializing everything back onto his parents . . . ; he has need of lower intensities. But in his activity, as in his passions, he is simultaneously the most deterritorialized and the most deterritorializing figure – the Orphan’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 79). The child does not abandon his parents; he reterritorialises everything back into the family in a moment of exhaustion, a pause and a slowing down from his activities, only to veer off again from the family and the Oedipal striations it entails, sweeping up the adult in the process: ‘He [the child] also forms a block of deterritorialization that shifts with time, the straight line of time, coming to reanimate the adult as one animates a puppet and giving the adult living connections’ (Deleuze and Guattari

Deleuze, Children and Worlding  183 1986: 79). The child animates the adult to form intense connections through blocks that deterritorialise the adult from the Oedipal family. The block that the child and the adult form does not mean that the adult stops being an adult or that the child stops being a child. Rather, It is a mannerism of sobriety without memory, where the adult is captured up in a childhood block without ceasing to be an adult, just as the child can be caught up in an adult block without ceasing to be a child. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 79)

The child and the adult come to share mannerisms that are available to both of them, without the adult necessarily regressing into childish behaviour, imitating children. Rather, the child and the adult are placed next to each other to provoke ‘a becoming-child of the adult taking place in the adult, a becoming-adult of the child taking place in the child, both in contiguity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 79). The child and the adult form a contiguous block where they do not stop being a child or an adult, but where they engage in a dispersion of intensities and energies that transform both of them – if they are open and ready to incline toward those contagious flows. Becoming-child, then, does not only pertain to the adult, but it includes children as well. Deleuze and Guattari speak of ‘the becoming-child of the adult as well as of the child’ so that the child may tap into becoming through his or her own becoming-child (1987: 277). Becoming-child puts less of an emphasis on the noun child (as if to become a child through imitating children or through regressing into childhood) than on the verb becoming as an invitation to the child and the adult to form a ‘unit of “child-ness” in which something involving children takes place’ and ‘of entering into a relation with child-ness that unsettles fixed identities and categories’ (Bogue 2010: 95, 98). Child-ness is a quality that is not reducible to the child but that transpires when we are put in relation to the child or the idea of the child. It is a felt sense, a ‘kind of elusive quiddity’ (Bohlmann and Moreland 2015: 15) that defines children, at least from an adult perspective, pointing both toward the discursive construction of ‘the child,’ reminding us of the forms of perception and representation involved in creating this idea, and toward something extra-discursive, extra-linguistic and even ineffable; some inaccessible sine non qua without which ‘the child’ could not be conceived. (Bohlmann and Moreland 2015: 16)

Deleuze and Guattari contend that ‘children must become child’ (1987: 291) so that they are put in relation to the cultural logic and rhetoric

184  Markus P. J. Bohlmann that shapes them as child and so as to facilitate a destabilisation of the category child by entering into proximity to child-ness, which, through its ineffability and ethereality, opens onto the deterritorialising forces of becoming. With regard to the ageist distinction between children and adults, a child’s engagement with the world and ‘the deterritorialising force that is activated in the playful world of the child’ (Bogue 2010: 99) behoves Deleuze and Guattari to assert that ‘the child is the becoming-young of every age. Knowing how to age does not mean remaining young; it means extracting from one’s age the particles, the speeds and slownesses, the flows that constitute the youth of that age’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 277; cited in Bogue 2010: 99; original emphasis). Age is not so much tied to time and the passage thereof, but it becomes a matter of affect and attitude where ‘the “youth” of a given age is its newness, its power of setting in disequilibrium the codes, conventions and practices of fixed power structures’ (Bogue 2010: 99). It is the extraction of affect that destabilises rigidified and despotic structures and methods, and it is this extraction that makes up ‘youth’, which is available at any time and at any ‘age’. Its impulse multiplies across ‘a continuum of b ­ ecomings  – becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, and so on – across which forces of deterritorialisation play, each instance creating a metamorphic zone of possibilities specific to that becoming’ (Bogue 2010: 99). One of those zones falls between the child and the adult, making their distinction falter, where each entity ‘is neither adult nor child, but a passage between those identities’ (Bogue 2010: 98) within a milieu of energies, fluxes and speeds that traverses those entities in their becoming. At the same time, those entities do not cease to be an adult and a child but reterritorialise whilst everything has changed. The term block or bloc describes a disjunctive synthesis, a coming together so as not to form a unit but to diverge in multiplicities in proliferation.5 Childhood memories bring together the adult and the child, binding the adult to the child and to childhood so as to analyse childhood to find out what went wrong on one’s path towards adulthood, and who is to blame. Disrupting such a binding, Deleuze and Claire Parnet petition that [t]he Freudian formula must be reversed. You have to produce the unconscious. It is not at all a matter of repressed memories or even of phantasms. You don’t reproduce childhood memories, you produce blocs of childbecoming with blocs of childhood which are always in the present. (2006: 58; original emphasis)

Deleuze, Children and Worlding  185 Instead of retrieving repressed memories in accordance with a longing for bygone days of childhood bliss or an imagining of how blissful one’s childhood could and should have been, Deleuze and Parnet entreat us to produce childhood blocks to destabilise the developmental stream between child and adult, which childhood memories would otherwise cement, and to pull out of this continuous stream through modes of deterritorialisation. For Deleuze and Parnet, A man manufactures or assembles [agence], not with the egg from which he emerged, nor with the progenitors who attach him to it, nor with the images that he draws from it, nor with the structure of germination, but with the scrap of placenta which he has hidden, and which is always contemporary with him, as raw material to experiment with. (2006: 58; original square brackets)

Childhood, ancestors and evolution are left behind whilst the scrap of placenta is adjacent to the man, always available to him as a generative principle. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that in this coexistence, one may contrast a childhood block, or a becoming-child, with the childhood memory: ‘a’ molecular child is produced . . . ‘a’ child coexists with us, in a zone of proximity or a block of becoming, on a line of deterritorialization that carries us both off – as opposed to the child we once were, whom we remember or phantasize, the molar child whose future is the adult. (1987: 294; original emphasis and ellipsis)

One produces a molecular child through forming a childhood block with ‘childhood memories’, a child who enters in relation with us through a disjunctive synthesis that steers us both out of a sedimented and enclosed selfhood and onto terrains that open out onto the universe in a process of becoming-child that is not a ‘self’ but the cosmos, the explosion of the world: a childhood that is not my own, that is not a memory but a block, an anonymous and infinite fragment, a becoming that is always contemporary. (Deleuze 1997: 113–14)

Instead of advancing a personal ownership of my childhood, as Freud would have, Deleuze and Guattari deterritorialise us from our ownership of childhood and the developmental stream in which we have been captured, discounting the use of childhood memories to reterritorialise us into this developmental trajectory. Their becoming-child connects the child and the adult to the cosmos and its forces that are constitutive of the child and the adult, and the world. Deleuze and Guattari therefore respond to Castañeda’s ‘wish to suggest that worlds could be made otherwise, precisely through some form of unknowing’ (Castañeda

186  Markus P. J. Bohlmann 2002: 11) as this form of unknowing involves the forces of the cosmos and the universe, eluding our understanding, formulation and control. Deleuze and Guattari thus ask us not to know but to experience, ‘[t]o be present at the dawn of the world’ (1987: 280), so that we may witness that which is emerging and yet to emerge.

Worlding Deleuze and Guattari begin their chapter entitled ‘1837: Of the Refrain’ in A Thousand Plateaus with a description of the Refrain that depicts a (male) child engaged in worlding: A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, centre in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment . . . Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organize a limited space . . . The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do . . . Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. (1987: 311)

In this passage, Deleuze and Guattari describe a child, frightened, creating a fragile territory amidst chaos, a home, which threatens to collapse back into chaos at any time. The child eventually gathers up the strength to crack open the territory and to launch forth – in company or not – onto a region that has been created by the circle itself and that is part of the world. The child withdraws into an invigorating solitude only to launch forth again alongside modes of de- and reterritorialisation. The child here does not follow a developmental stream ‘up’ to adulthood along a chronological timeline, but engages in his own time, cracking open the circle’s bounded circumferences when the child feels ready,

Deleuze, Children and Worlding  187 with an attitude of curiosity and openness, connecting with the world of which the child has already been a part. Growth, here, is not measured according to a successful passage of developmental stages ‘up’ to adulthood along the passing of chronological time, but it becomes a question of attitude and affect, of withdrawal and connection, of stagnation and movement, of resistance and acceptance, of fragmentation and integration, of forgiveness and letting go alongside intensive and extensive modes of de- and reterritorialisation that unfold in the child’s own time. Growth, then, does not involve a subject in disconnection from the world, but unfolds in connection with the world and the cosmic forces that compose the subject and the world at the same time,6 giving rise to the creation of worlds such as described in the passage above. To draw out some of the implications of the worlding that Deleuze and Guattari present with regard to the child, I turn to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1924) as a text that depicts a child who refuses to ‘grow up’ and who withdraws into a child world through a mode of reterritorialisation that hinges on that which becomes an obstruction to his worlding: that is, the wound. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan offers Neverland as an alternative world to the world of London. Yet rather than constituting an alternative to the fears and anxieties that govern the world from which the children fly away, Neverland becomes a reproduction and expansion of that world.7 It is the wound that lodges Peter in a mode of painful resentment, closing him in on his territorial domain bounded by fear. Peter is a wounded child. He finds himself shut out from his parental home through a barred window upon his return from a lengthy outing, presuming that his ‘mother had forgotten all about [him], and [beholding that] there was another little boy sleeping in [his] bed’ (Barrie 2009: 129), upon which he decides to fly to Neverland to stay a child forever. Peter’s resistance towards growing up manifests in his spatial separation from the world in which he is expected to grow up temporally. Once in Neverland, Peter stalls time and continues to long for a return to the mother-child union from which he has been barred, which attests to his separation anxiety from his mother and the sheltered world she represents. Unable to move backwards in time, Peter searches for a mothersubstitute to return to the mother-child union out of which he has been cast. Beginning with Wendy and a maternal line of daughters, starting with Wendy’s daughter, Jane, Peter takes those girls to Neverland ‘every spring-cleaning time’ to clean his house (Barrie 2009: 205). Peter thus extends an Oedipal realm where his wish to return to his mother is futile and deceptive because his problem does not so much lie in the separation

188  Markus P. J. Bohlmann from his mother as in a separation from the world: Peter is an individual who is afraid to be alone, separated from the union with his mother and the shelter this union provides, where there now sleeps ‘another little boy’. He is also afraid to be an individual, understood as someone who is self-contained and cut off from the world that surrounds him. It is his separation from the world that constitutes his problem, his separation from the earth, the cosmos and the universe as an individual longing for the mother-child unit, which already constitutes one remove from the world – a world of which Peter is afraid. Peter responds to his woundedness through reterritorialising in his ego.8 His denomination as ‘Great White Father’ (Barrie 2009: 116) attests to a God-like despotism which he establishes in Neverland and to which he makes the other children abide, killing off those who refuse to share his worldview that it be best to remain children forever and who decide to grow up (Barrie 2009: 58–9, 130). Peter Pan’s reign over the children forms what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘paranoid despotic regime’ (1987: 112): Peter monitors the children through ever-widening circles emanating from the centre of his regime, making everyone subject to its dominion. His rule replicates patriarchy’s tending to its (male) children to secure and to perpetuate its lineage through a paranoid regime of surveillance that is supposed to guarantee the continuation of patriarchal structures and methodologies through the boy-child. Peter’s reterritorialisation in his ego finds expression through the house which the children build for Wendy and of which he takes immediate ownership; ‘seeing this [house] to be a good idea, [he] at once pretended that it was his own’ (Barrie 2009: 82). The ‘underground house’ (Barrie 2009: 87) is devoid of openings other than the hollow trees that fit the children, connecting the house to the upper ground (Barrie 2009: 85). The house becomes an arborescent edifice and centre of Peter’s regime. Its dedication to Wendy renders her synonymous with the house. Wendy becomes a place of refuge for the boys, a shelter that her body and her role as mother in the house offers to them. With regard to this equation of the house and females, Kathryn Bond Stockton notes, ‘Like a woman’s body, in a fetishistic sense, the house is a reflection of a man’s position: it’s a place he penetrates and thus it is his body – also his views, literally so – in an extended sense’ (2009: 197). The house and the female body belong to the man and his worldviews. He penetrates the house with his views just as he penetrates the female body. Though Peter opposes Wendy’s idea of him becoming her husband as this would entail him becoming a sexual adult (Barrie 2009: 122–3), his longing for a mother and for Wendy to be his mother renders her a territory that he

Deleuze, Children and Worlding  189 seeks to penetrate and to inhabit so that he may dwell in a mother-child union that he aims to make his ‘home’. The house underground where the children live, then, constitutes a territory within a habitat in which the house becomes a ‘quasi-extension[] or figuration[] of human personality’, as David R. Jarraway writes in his work on houses as symbols of human subjectivity (2010: 175). The house underground becomes a design of the self, showcasing Peter’s sedimentation that includes the children inhabiting this underground domain as subjects of his dominion. It is a place of shelter, but also one of penetration and control. ‘Everything begins with Houses,’ Deleuze and Guattari remark (1994: 189). For them, however, houses are not so much static and enclosed edifices, but contain openings such as doors, windows and thresholds by which ‘the most shut-up house opens onto a universe’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 180). With the house connecting to a universe, the house no longer contains its inhabitants, nor do its inhabitants inhabit the house any longer. Both become part of the universe whereby [t]he flesh, or rather the figure, is no longer the inhabitant of the place, of the house, but of the universe that supports the house (becoming). It is like a passage from the finite to the infinite, but also from territory to deterritorialization. It is indeed the moment of the infinite: infinitely varied infinities. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 180–1; original emphasis)

The house and its inhabitants are supported, held and sustained by the universe as the house’s openings do not lead to a void or a nothingness of extinction, but to an emptiness and to the energies and forces that went into the house’s making and are present in this becoming-universe of the house and its inhabitants, signalling a departure from the house as a stable figuration of the self, initiating a worlding such as sketched in the Refrain above. Peter resists such deterritorialisations. He holds on to his ‘housed ego’.9 He remains lodged in his territory generated by his woundedness, failing to utilise the wound for the creation of worlds other than the one in which he has grown and which he resists and lives at the same time. Peter identifies this wound and ascribes its origin to his separation from his mother, insisting that the barred window be the cause of his wound. Indeed, Deleuze affirms that [a] wound is incarnated or is actualized in a state of things and in lived experience. A wound itself, however, is a pure virtual on the plane of immanence which leads us to a life. My wound existed before me . . . Not a transcendence of the wound as some higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality always within a milieu. (1997: 393; original ellipsis)

190  Markus P. J. Bohlmann Peter conceives of the wound as a ‘higher actuality’ solely, that is, as the experience of his separation from his mother and his replacement by another child. He fails to perceive of the wound in its virtuality and as an opening threshold onto the universe as a possibility for the creation of worlds. He bars his own window onto the world. Peter fails to be worthy of the wound, to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one’s carnal birth – to become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event. (Deleuze 1990: 149–50)

Peter reacts to the event, failing to release it. He literally reroutes the line of flight that emerges in his state of woundedness into a flight to Neverland and the Oedipal territories from which he is fleeing. In this regard, Deleuze and Parnet wonder, ‘What is it which tells us that, on a line of flight, we will not rediscover everything we were fleeing? In fleeing the eternal mother-father, will we not rediscover all the Oedipal structures on the line of flight?’ (2006: 29). Peter’s quest to unwound his wound and his woundedness by returning to the union with his mother, the separation from whom he maintains as the cause of his wound, stalls him in his child world. He fails to metabolise his wound in a re-worlding, but recreates the world of Oedipus through Neverland, a world based on the wound and on woundedness, but foremost on resistance and fear, where growth is impossible to begin with. ‘[I]t is too easy to give an Oedipal reading of Peter Pan,’ remarks Jacqueline Rose in her seminal study The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1992: 35). Oedipus abounds in J. M. Barrie’s novel, expanding his dominion to Neverland, which becomes, quite literally, a never-land, that is, a land that is never to be.10 Given the ubiquity of Oedipus, the narrator’s statement that the age of ‘[t]wo is the beginning of the end’ (Barrie 2009: 1) does not come as a surprise, given that this age marks a point in time when children are expected to master their first words upon entering the symbolic order. Yet their entry also marks the end of their worlding insofar as language now separates the child from the world, which language now symbolically represents. For Rose, language thus receives the denomination as being corrupt and corrupting, which, in turn, results in the conceptualisation of the child as linguistically ‘pure’ and closer to the material world than the adult. This conceptualisation of the pure child and the pure word lies at the heart of children’s literature, which, according to Rose, aims to produce

Deleuze, Children and Worlding  191 an almost identical conception of a language once pure and an uncorrupted culture or primitive state. If the child can still be in touch with that purity, then writing for children is the closest that we, as adults, can get to it today. (1992: 49)

This coupling of the ‘innocence of the child and of the word’ (Rose 1992: 49) responds to a quest on behalf of the adult writer wanting to get in touch with that which lies outside Oedipus, outside language and the world in which the adult has long been captured and in which, as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan shows, the child is caught up as well. This longing for a world outside our world and a purity that has been lost, then, moves through innocence, which the child is supposed to possess. Innocence’s suggested blankness here then forms a surface that reflects back to us our world. With Deleuze, however, innocence is not so much a mirror that reflects what is and what is not, but a window, a threshold, where the reflecting surface perforates in a becoming-world where it is impossible to distinguish between the child and the adult – you and me – and the world. It is a becoming-one with cosmic forces and energies, and it is this release into the world that renders both us and the world innocent. Innocence is a wounded word, at least in the English language. Its Latin root word nocere means ‘to harm’, which the prefix in negates.11 The word innocence thus bears unwoundedness and the wound at the same time.12 The wound thus retains a present absence/absent presence in the word, a virtuality, to follow Deleuze. Innocence then shifts from denoting an erasure and a negation of this (adult) world, a blankness that negates the world that is (e.g. ‘I have’ vs ‘I have not’), to denoting that which is yet to come.13 Rather than negating the world, innocence denotes a threshold onto worlds yet to be actualised within a plethora of worlds to find actualisation on the glittering cusp of the virtual and the actual. Innocence integrates us into the world, in line with the meaning of ‘integrity’ of the Latin word innocentia.14 Innocence, then, is not something that is intrinsic to the child or the defining characteristic of the child. The child is innocent in that the child is in touch with the world apart from the mother-child bond in which the child is otherwise subsumed. It is this connection to the world that renders both the child and the adult innocent, as we both are a part of the world, the earth and the cosmos-universe, and it is through our wounds and woundedness that we gain access to the creation of worlds, that is, if we have the courage to open to our wounds and our woundedness, and if we begin to let go of our entanglements in the child and childhood, which are supposed to shield and to protect us from the world rather than connect us with the

192  Markus P. J. Bohlmann world. Our investment in identity politics furthermore separates us from the world, building the house of the ego, which, as seen in Peter Pan, merely generates anxiety and fear of the world. Childhood, then, may be seen as the raising of the ego. We need to bring our childhood to a close so that we may ‘grow’ and we need to have the courage to leap across the thresholds of our own closed, territorialised circles and to world worlds in connection to the earth and the universe. To conclude, the worlding that Deleuze and Guattari present witnesses a (male) child in touch with the world and the cosmic forces that inform the child’s world. It is the connectivity to the earth and the universe that allows the child to let go of fear and to open his circle – with or without guidance – onto new relations and new connections with the world in which this child has been drawing his circles. Deleuze and Guattari’s worlding solicits a disentanglement of the adult and the child in favour of their placement in lateral proximity to each other, rather than in a vertical-hierarchical relation.15 It entails a connection within a childhood block between the child and the adult where one can no longer distinguish between them, where the child and the adult becomeimperceptible as they join the world and everything and everybody else. This means that they do not become invisible, but imperceptible in the sense that they can no longer be grasped and monitored as individuals. They do not adapt to the masses, but connect with them and the world, the cosmos and its forces. As Deleuze and Guattari remark, everybody/everything is the molar aggregate, but becoming everybody/ everything is another affair, one that brings into play the cosmos with its molecular components . . . It is in this sense that becoming-everybody/ everything, making the world a becoming, is to world, to make a world or worlds, in other words, to find one’s proximities and zones of indiscernibility. (1987: 279–80; original emphasis)

To connect with the world, the earth and the cosmos, and with everyone else in those zones of indiscernibility does not entail a disappearance from the world, an annihilation, but rather the loss of fear as someone who is separate from everybody and everything else, who is being placed under surveillance, such as a child monitored within our more than paranoid politics of child protection. Connecting to the world and the cosmos-universe through a becoming-imperceptible, however, means ‘producing immediately, directly a world in which it is the world that becomes, [in which] then one becomes-everybody/everything’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 280; original emphasis). It is this connection with the world and everybody and everything else that Deleuze and

Deleuze, Children and Worlding  193 Guattari present in their idea of worlding through a (male) child, where the notion of becoming-child bids the child and the adult to let go of fear and to welcome the emergence of worlds where the dreaded chaos upon shedding one’s ego-based world might be nothing but another projection of fear, turning us once more into ‘little children’ in need of growth.

Acknowledgment I wish to thank Ian Buchanan for his invaluable input and comments.

Notes   1. See, for example, James R. Kincaid’s comment that ‘[c]hildhood, to a large extent, came to be in our culture a coordinate set of have nots, of negations: the child was the one who did not have’ and the adult was the one who had (1998: 15; original emphasis). Jacqueline Rose also remarks that the child and the adult ‘are structural oppositions in the strictest sense, in that each term only has meaning in relation to the one to which it is opposed’ (1992: 50).   2. See Blum 1995: 23–4.   3. See Blum’s account of the ‘inner child’ movement where ‘[t]he recuperation and reparenting of the inner child is a monumental task; no time is left for children external to the solipsistic embrace’ (1995: 248).   4. In keeping with Freud’s, Deleuze’s, Guattari’s and Parnet’s referencing of the male gender, I retain the pronoun he for the child for the most part in this chapter, advocating that it is the male child in particular who is in need of worlding.   5. On the disjunctive synthesis, see, for example, Deleuze 1990: 174–5.   6. See also Hannah Stark’s definition of worlding as the ‘mutual constitution of the subject and the world’ (2008: 7).   7. Ashton Howley commented on this in one of his lectures on Peter Pan at the University of Ottawa.   8. Peter’s separation from the world could be explained through his ego-formation as a child, following Sigmund Freud’s remark on the ego as ‘appear[ing] to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else’ (1995: 724).   9. Referring to Freud’s equation of the ego and the house, David Macey notes that, after Freud, ‘the ego is not . . . master in its own house [any more], and cannot aspire to Cartesian certainties’ (Macey 1995: 74; cited in Jarraway 2010: 175). On houses and human subjectivity, see also David R. Jarraway’s work noted elsewhere in this chapter. 10. Neverland witnessed a reduction from an obvious to a rather subtle ambiguity. Peter Hollindale notes, ‘Peter Pan’s island was called the Never, Never, Never Land in the first draft of the play, the Never Never Land in the play as performed (and also in When Wendy Grew Up), the Never Land in the play as published, and the Neverland in Peter and Wendy’ (1995: 311). 11. Available at (last accessed 18 March 2018). 12. On this exposition of innocence, see Bohlmann and Moreland 2014: 90.

194  Markus P. J. Bohlmann 13. See, for example, Kincaid’s remark that innocence has become ‘firmly attached to this world and to this world’s sexuality’ in particular, which is why ‘desirable faces must be blank’ (1998: 15, 17). Here, the blank face of a child coordinates ‘a set of inversions: innocence, purity, emptiness’ and asexuality to the adult, where innocence, posited as a ‘flatness[,] . . . doesn’t interfere with our [adult] projections’ on to the child (Kincaid 1998: 15, 17). 14. Available at (last accessed 18 March 2018). 15. See Bohlmann 2012.

References Barrie, J. M. (2009), Peter Pan, London: Vintage Books. Blum, V. (1995), Hide and Seek: The Child between Psychoanalysis and Fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bogues, R. (2010), Fabulation or the Scars of History, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bohlmann, M. P. J. (2012), ‘Strange Spaces of Alterity: Identity and its Limits in Todd Field’s Little Children’, Post Script, 32 (1): 39–60. Bohlmann, M. P. J. and S. Moreland (2014), ‘“If You Rip the Fronts Off Houses”: Killing Innocence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943)’, in D. Olson (ed.), Children in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87–112. Bohlmann, M. P. J. and S. Moreland (2015), ‘Introduction: Holy Terrors and Other Musings on Monstrous-Childness’, in M. P. J. Bohlmann and S. Moreland (eds), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 9–25. Castañeda, C. (2002), Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, ed. C. V. Boundas, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. Smith and M. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2007), ‘Immanence: A Life’, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 388–93. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (2006), Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Continuum. Freud, S. (1995), ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in P. Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader, New York: Vintage, pp. 722–72. Hollindale, P. (1995), J. M. Barrie: Peter Pan and Other Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jarraway, D. R. (2010), ‘“Ancestor of Narcissus”: Stevens and Psychoanalysis between Freud and Deleuze’, The Wallace Stevens Journal, 34 (2): 161–80. Kincaid, J. R. (1998), Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child-Molesting, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Deleuze, Children and Worlding  195 Macey, D. (1995), ‘On the Subject of Lacan’, in A. Elliott and S. Frosch (eds), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture, London: Routledge, pp. 72–86. Rose, J. (1992), The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stark, H. (2008), ‘“But we always make love with worlds”: Deleuze (and Guattari) and Love’, Online Proceedings of ‘Sustaining Culture’, Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia (CSAA) UniSA, Adelaide, 6–8 December 2007; available at (last accessed 12 July 2018). Stockton, K. B. (2009), The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chapter 11

Child, Baby, Embryo, Brain, Monster

Jon Roffe

être enfants, c’est-à-dire être Amélie Nothomb, Le sabotage amoureux

The Season of Thought One of the most perspicuous philosophical treatments of the theme of childhood is found in the work of Jean-François Lyotard. That this is the case is widely underappreciated, despite the fact that the word ‘child’ appears in the titles of two of his books: The Postmodern Explained to Children, and Lectures d’enfance, which we could translate, a little slyly, as Infantile Readings, as well as the more direct Readings of Childhood. Both titles are remarkable in their way, conveying or implying Lyotard’s main contention – that rather than being a biological stage or developmental moment, childhood is ‘the season of thought’ (1992: 101) and therefore constitutes a privileged topos and orientation for philosophy. Lyotard’s infancy is an infancy that is not an age of life and does not pass. It haunts discourse. The latter does not cease to put it aside, it is its separation. But it stubbornly persists thereby in constituting it, as lost. Unknowingly, therefore, it shelters it. It is its remainder. (Lyotard 1991: 9)

This interest in childhood is of a piece with Lyotard’s broader ambit as a thinker – to affirm the event as what is in excess of all forms of conscious, representational and socio-political capture.1 Not only, then, is infancy an event that will come to haunt the adult, the event itself constitutes the permanent infancy of the world. The ‘infancy of the event’ (Lyotard 1992: 90) ineluctably accompanies every relatively stabilised and normalised reality, leaving them always open to transformation. This is particularly the case for the nexus of rationality and representation, and the

Child, Baby, Embryo, Brain, Monster  197 Western philosophical tradition that rests on their intersection. The event of infancy (a near pleonasm, as I have just said) ceaselessly troubles the capacity for rational thought to grasp (begreifen, saisir), represent, the totality of what is. Rational totality, and with it comprehensive representation, is the very real figment of an act of totalising, one that covers over the infancy of states of the world at the level of reason and knowledge without quite being able to evict it in reality. Furthermore, in Lyotard’s accounting, childhood is a season of the unknown not just for reason in the sense of Kant’s Verstand – the faculty of the rules for determinate judgement – but for sensibility, Sinnlichkeit. The event, childhood, names what opened a wound in sensibility. You know this because it has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unknown temporality. That wound led into an unknown world, though without ever making it known. Such initiation initiates to nothing, it just begins. (Lyotard 1992: 91; translation modified)

At first blush, the reflections on childhood found throughout Deleuze’s work2 appear to be entirely in keeping with Lyotard’s analysis: Alice and her ‘adventures’ (Deleuze 1990: 9),3 Richard with his ‘sense of humour’ (Deleuze 2007: 100), Little Hans with his little machines, all those movements of becoming-child, including the becoming-child of philosophy called Spinoza (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256). Deleuze’s child itself breaks with the hegemony of psychoanalytic thinking, of identity and identitarianism, of interpretosis and the totalitarianism of a certain rationalism. ‘What can a child do?’ is the guiding question; no need to ask ‘what will she become?’, for the child is this becoming without any externally posited goal. Deleuze also clearly agrees with Lyotard that the representational capture of thought extends beyond representational rationality and into our ways of feeling. Despite the shifting ground of memory and the experience of depth that it gives us, Habit rules at both levels; on both fronts, the child – clumsy, left-handed, a skater rather than a swimmer or the pilot of kites – is the figure of what is covered over by reason and the rule of the Logos. But this first appearance of an agreement is, arguably, misleading. Lyotard’s childhood bilan figures it as a negativity, as a specific form of lack. The adult, apparently assured in its mastery, is an inverted cripple,4 the figure of a canalised rationality grotesquely extended, but the child too is a cripple, an innate cripple, the embodiment of a natal flaw in reason itself, the name for an ineluctable incapacity.

198  Jon Roffe In Deleuze, on the contrary, the child is an entirely positive figure. In the terms of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, it names a genetic moment which accounts for the advent of the adult; in those of Anti-Oedipus and the surrounding texts, it names a perverse excess  of desiring-machines that link illegally across Oedipal borders; in those of A Thousand Plateaus, a line of flight that carries the adult away in a movement that cannot but transform its subject. In all of these cases, the child is a figure not of pre-psycho-lapsarian innocence but of instances of a positive, aggressive struggle for a certain engagement with life, and not a lack, an absence, a wound. For Lyotard, the child is the figure of what is ‘at once more familiar and more strange’ (1992: 93), but the strangeness in question only ever maintains itself in the position of its non-resolvability – which is to say, it only ever withdraws as such. ‘When the law comes to me, with the ego and language,’ he writes, ‘it is too late’ (Lyotard 1992: 93).5 But beyond this contrast, a further point can be made, and it is this that I would like to develop in what follows. The point is that the child is less significant in Deleuze’s thought than it can appear. It is not really the fundamental figure of the genetic moment in thought for Deleuze, but already a part of the result of the process in question. In this sense, or so I will argue, Lyotard is right to assign the child a certain negativity, for it is situated at the hinge between ontogenesis and established states of affairs – or, as we will see, between the baby and the adult. To poorly paraphrase a line from Difference and Repetition: the child is the noumenon closest to the phenomenon of the ‘normal’ habituated adult thinker – but it is not the name for what is most profound. The apparent prominence of the child in Deleuze will have to be displaced if we are to grasp what this is.

From the Child to the Baby The first justification for displacing the child in this way is found in a late essay that appears in Essays Critical and Clinical, ‘To Have Done with Judgment’. Deleuze’s aim there is to oppose two general existential modes, which are also modalities of thinking: existence as such, and the regime of judgement, which subjects existence to the transcendent, dolorous rule of infinite debt, to sad passions, and to the organised body that bears the negative capability of what the organisation does not allow. Deleuze’s claim is not that there exists a native quasi-Rousseauian paradise that would be ‘prejudicative’ (1997: 127) and to which we should strive to return, but that existence itself always subtends the

Child, Baby, Embryo, Brain, Monster  199 regime of judgement, constituting a kind of immanent struggle that he registers in the piece. We must be clear, though, on what characterises this struggle. The regime of judgement certainly has its own mode of struggle, what he here calls war: War is only a combat-against, a will to destruction, a judgment of God that turns destruction into something ‘just.’ The judgment of God is on the side of war . . . Even when it takes hold of other forces, the force of war begins by mutilating these forces, reducing them to their lowest state. (Deleuze 1997: 133)6

War in this sense is not just the wars great and small recorded in history, but a way of organising incompatible forces. The pettiness of a degrading argument is a war in this sense; the diminution of one’s capacity to act at the hands of the university system is a war in this sense as well. In every case, there is some form of an ‘imperialism of death’ (Deleuze 1997: 133), and there are imperatorum everywhere. To war, Deleuze opposes combat. This term designates a struggle that is not a struggle against anything, but a striving for (Spinoza’s conatus). He writes that combat ‘is a powerful, non-organic vitality that supplements force with force, and enriches whatever it takes hold of’ (Deleuze 1997: 133). He then introduces a surprising emblem for this notion of existence-as-combat: A baby vividly displays this vitality, this obstinate, stubborn, and indomitable will to live that differs from all organic life. With a young child, one already has an organic, personal relationship, but not with the baby, who concentrates in its smallness the same energy that shatters paving stones (Lawrence’s baby tortoise). With a baby, one has nothing but an affective, athletic, impersonal, vital relationship. The will to power certainly appears in an infinitely more exact manner in a baby than in a man of war. For the baby is combat, and the small is an irreducible locus of forces, the most revealing test of forces. (Deleuze 1997: 133)

This remarkable passage deserves careful explication. In this context, however, I will only note two things:7 the first concerns the new distinction, which I do not believe appears anywhere else in Deleuze, between the child and the baby. And while the specific opposition is elsewhere absent, the principle that it expresses is found everywhere in Deleuze: it is the principle of sub-representational difference. The child already possesses a name and a personality, has already contracted the habit of saying ‘I’ (Deleuze 1991: x). The baby, on the other hand, is not yet caught up in this kind of organisation, that is, in the register of

200  Jon Roffe j­udgement. This is the reason for the absolutely captivating phrase Deleuze uses above: ‘For the baby is combat’ (1997: 133). The baby is combat itself, active striving in person, the struggle of force with force in person. Moreover, however, this living combat is not even yet, in Deleuze’s view, life in the strictly biological sense. Second, we must note the relation between the baby and the (adult) thinker: ‘nothing but an affective, athletic, impersonal, vital relation’ (Deleuze 1997: 133). Unlike the already formed being of the child, the positivity of the baby is of a kind that does not allow representational footholds or crochets on to which representational rationality can latch.

From the Baby to the Embryo It is a pleasing irony that the invocation of the baby occurs very late, almost at the very end of Deleuze’s life and work. Despite its late arrival,8 it functions as a goad to his readers to look further than the figures of the child that, in their clumsy left-handed fashion, occupy the byways of his earlier work. The baby, as we have just seen, is situated prior to the capture of life by the order of judgement – in other words, the baby is the ontogenetic figure with respect to thinking. What are its correlates? With respect to the ontogenesis of beings themselves – the genesis of living forms – the principal answer is the embryo, and more specifically the egg. The egg appears not just at important moments in Difference and Repetition, but also in the later work with Guattari (the Dogon egg, the cosmic egg, the tantric egg). While these eggs share a close relation with the embryonic eggs of Difference and Repetition, it is the latter that most clearly reveal the point of emphasis that concerns me here.9 Like ‘To Have Done with Judgment’, the overall goal of Difference and Repetition is to explain how a secondary level of reality emerges, how this emergence covers over the conditions of its genesis, and how this secondary level comes to appear as what is foundational. In the former text, a primary combat or striving-amongst of forces is captured by the regime of judgement, which situates itself as the natural, the natal and the ground. In the latter, the differential ontogenesis of beings is at once submerged in extended and qualified reality, and captured by the representational matrix in which difference only ever appears as subordinate to identity. The importance of Difference and Repetition is found in its powerful account of the mechanism of capture, which is itself a necessary result of ontogenesis. Now, for Deleuze it is the egg that gives us the framework for thinking ontogenesis (1994: 251). The egg is prior to the organic individual; the

Child, Baby, Embryo, Brain, Monster  201 embryo is prior – biologically and ontologically, and not just temporally – to both the child and the baby; between them, there is a difference-inkind. This is the truth revealed, not always very faithfully, by modern embryology: ‘Embryology already displays the truth that there are systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them’ (Deleuze 1994: 118). The dynamic reality of the embryo is an intensive drama, one that takes place not on an established stage with distinct, actualised agents, but as an integral flux of tendencies and transformations. That is, as Deleuze puts it later in Difference and Repetition, Embryology shows that the division of an egg into parts is secondary in relation to more significant morphogenetic movements: the augmentation of free surfaces, stretching of cellular layers, invagination by folding, regional displacement of groups. A whole kinematics of the egg appears. (1994: 214)

Deleuze, however, will not hesitate to completely generalise this embryological account: in Difference and Repetition he asserts, not once but three times, that ‘the world is an egg’. There is no ontogenetic process that does not involve a certain embryogenesis. Now, in the background of Deleuze’s engagement with and generalisation of embryology is another, lesser-known French philosopher, Raymond Ruyer. While he is only explicitly referenced once in Difference and Repetition, his significance is worth carefully attending to – at the very least because his final posthumously published book is entitled The Embryogenesis of the World and the Silent God.10 As Ronald Bogue writes, ‘If “the world is an egg”, as Deleuze asserts in Difference and Repetition, it is through an examination of the thought of Ruyer and its appropriation by Deleuze that one may most easily grasp the full implications of this assertion’ (2009: 300). For our purposes, three elements of Ruyer’s novel psychobiological account of the embryo are significant.11 Like Deleuze, his account carefully follows the trajectory of modern embryology – carefully enough, in fact, to allow him to demonstrate the major errors found in the theoretical account of the embryo provided by biologists in the wake of their discoveries. The first element concerns the complete incapacity to account for the embryo in the course of its development in terms of a pre-existing structure, whether this be ideal (Aristotle) or material (whether preformationism, early twentieth-century field-gradient theory or modern genetics). In a word, the insistence that the dynamism of the embryo can

202  Jon Roffe be completely accounted for in terms of an already explicated structure is an insistence on the fact that there is no fundamental dynamism at all. It is to adopt, as Deleuze puts it, the position of ‘an adult observer who contemplates them from without’ (1994: 214). It is also, moreover and more importantly, to ignore the experimental evidence concerning embryogenesis itself. This process begins, of course, with a single fertilised cell, which then not only splits into two cells, then four, then eight, and so on, but which progressively becomes specialised, that is, determined to become a certain tissue and not another. Up to a certain moment, however, modifications of these cells that were ‘destined’ to become one thing will become another – what would have become part of the brain will now be a part of the epidermis; the displaced cartilage of the ear will form a tympan elsewhere (Ruyer 1958: 24, 110). More dramatic again are the results of experiments – such as those of Hans Driesch on sea urchin embryos – that reveal an irreducible genetic force proper to embryogenesis.12 Driesch began with the embryo after its first fission into two cells. Cutting these cells apart, he was surprised to discover not the growth of two half urchins, but of two whole new individuals from the divorced halves. Certain cellular material would have developed in a certain way, but Driesch’s intervention demonstrated that the cells are capable of being any part of the sea urchin at all, and even all of a sea urchin. The general consequence of this is, as Ruyer notes, that ‘[a] fertilised egg . . . is not a mosaic of territories that are irrevocably destined to engender this or that organ’ (2016: 49). In all of these experimental results, the same thing is apparent: that a kind of equipotentiality attends the embryo, at least up to a certain moment in its development, ‘a positive and dynamic power belonging to the tissue itself, which is immediately manifested in its differentiation (Ruyer 1958: 26). Prior to the functioning structure that the adult organism will become, there is the realm of an embryo’s polymorphic capacity to be otherwise. As Deleuze will put it, there are ‘things’ that only an embryo can do, movements that it alone can undertake or even withstand (for example, the anterior member of the tortoise undergoes a relative displacement of 180 degrees, while the neck involves the forward slippage of a variable number of proto-vertebrae). The destiny and achievement of the embryo is to live the unlivable, to sustain forced movements of a scope which would break any skeleton or tear ligaments. (1994: 205)

The second Ruyerian thematic that animates Deleuze’s account of the egg concerns the notion of theme, or the ‘vertical’ element in embryo-

Child, Baby, Embryo, Brain, Monster  203 genesis. Ruyer himself describes equipotentiality – taken on its own terms – as negative in character: ‘equipotentiality represents something negative, not positive . . . The equipotential territory is not at once itself and something else; it is not yet what it will become’ (2016: 56). It is true that the embryo can become other than what it might normally become, but it does become something. What accounts for this? In Deleuze’s terminology, this polarisation of equipotentiality is described in terms of the virtual ideas expressed by the intensive, embryonic individual. As in Ruyer, the virtual idea or problem functions not to directly cause a certain developmental moment, but to orient it. Both thinkers turn to the notion of a musical theme (arguably Deleuze takes the concept directly from Ruyer) to explain the particular agency of the vertical element, and both thinkers emphasise the contingent, improvised moment. Ruyer’s answer is that the living being engages with ideal mnemic themes: an embryonic bee actualises the bee-theme, in the way that any number of pianists can play, without any need for representational consciousness, a piece by Chopin ‘known’ by heart. And, indeed, embryogenesis, the very formation of the living being and its various parts, takes place in relation to the same thematic register: ‘The ear or the eye are thus formed, not of bits and pieces, and not through the massing of mechanical parts, but through the convergence of themes’ (Ruyer 1958: 191). More generally again, as Deleuze will argue, the production of reality consists in the actualisation of the virtual Idea, which he describes in exactly these terms: ‘A structure or an Idea is a “complex theme”, an internal multiplicity – in other words, a system of multiple, non-localisable connections between differential elements which is incarnated in real relations and actual terms’ (Deleuze 1994: 183). The final Ruyerian accent that Deleuze also takes up is the non-­ determinist character of actualisation or the expression of developmental themes. Developmental themes, not being transcendent forms, are not simply copied in the material world, but are always improvised. Like a musical theme, the mnemic theme of a species of bee is ‘played’ by the embryo itself in relation to the complex, irreducibly contingent environment in which the bee develops: ‘In the embryo, improvisation is everywhere’ (Ruyer 1958: 18).13 This is why Ruyer writes that ‘the organism forms itself with risks and perils; it is not formed . . . The living being forms itself directly according to the theme, without the theme having to first become idea-image and represented model’ (1958: 261–2). Deleuze frames his account of actualisation around the intensive encounter as radically contingent, but he makes the same point, as his

204  Jon Roffe fondness for Spinoza’s remarkable phrase makes evident: ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’ (Spinoza 1985: IIIP2S).

From the Embryo to the Brain To summarise, then: while the baby gives Deleuze a way of figuring the dynamic genetic processes that underlie rational representation and the regime of judgement, the embryo and the egg allow him to make the same point at the level of the formation of being itself. But now, like Ruyer, Deleuze will not be content to take the embryo as the sole site of this dynamic ontogenesis; following Ruyer, Deleuze will tend to rather invoke the brain as the primary, physical and conceptual, genetic category as his work develops. In contrast to the (now ubiquitous) account of the brain as an extended material structure, Ruyer argues that it must be considered as a dynamic, self-forming and re-forming surface. Once again, he draws upon famous neurological experiments, in particular those undertaken by Karl Lashley in the 1920s. Lashley’s experiments were meant to locate the physical location of memory traces or ‘engrams’ in the brains of rats. His experiments involved making precisely located lesions of various severity in the brains of rats at various stages of familiarity with running a maze for a reward. Ruyer summarises the results in the following terms: To his [Lashley’s] surprise, the experiments showed that very considerable lesions – more than 60 percent of the entire surface of the cortex – were necessary to slow down and not to render impossible the learning of the two-pedal box, and more than 30 percent to slow down the learning of the manipulation boxes. His experiments showed, on the other hand, that the site of the lesion has no importance whatsoever. (2016: 45; translation modified)

On the basis of these results, Lashley would go on to conclude that not  just memory but all complex neurological processes ‘are largely carried out in independence of structural differentiation’ (Lashley quoted in Tizard 1959: 141), that is, brain function is not localised. This led him to formulate a claim entirely analogous to – Ruyer prefers ‘isomorphic with’ (2007: 12) – that of Driesch with respect to embryogenesis: that the brain is primarily characterised by the state of equipotentiality. Correlatively, as Ruyer says, it is ‘a priori implausible to interpret what Lashley calls cerebral equipotentiality or the equipotentiality of the extended cortical zones . . . through a mechanical model in which a step-by-step causality reigns’ (2016: 48). If the brain was simply a

Child, Baby, Embryo, Brain, Monster  205 complex mechanism with discrete parts given over to discrete activities, cortical lesions would destroy its functioning, just as a broken string would destroy the functioning of a marionette. What Lashley showed, though, is that ‘The cortical surface – and the same holds, more or less distinctly, for all nervous centers – does not operate as a material surface with geometricophysical properties’ (Ruyer 2016: 46). Like the embryo, the brain is not explicable in terms of the functioning of an established and extended structure, but only as a dynamic self-forming being, whose structural relations and their concomitant capacities are not able to be predicted in advance. The brain begins to appear in precisely this sense in Deleuze’s works on the cinema. Here, as elsewhere, firmly in the lineage of Kant, he situates thought not on the side of the experiential subject (the empirical self watching the film) but on the side of the formal – or, better, trans­ individual – process unfolding on the screen, the montaged sequence of images. In a fundamental sense, the capacity of my individual brain to think whatever I like (the habituated thoughts of the petite bourgeoisie out for a night at the flicks) is displaced and replaced by the brain that is the screen itself. It is not the images that are illusions; the cinema-brain is what is concrete, while I become a disembodied spectator. Deleuze cites Artaud on this point in The Time-Image: ‘I can no longer think what I want, the moving images are substituted for my own thoughts’ (1989: 166). This is the meaning of the titular phrase he uses in an interview upon the publication of The Time-Image itself: ‘the brain is the screen’ (Deleuze 2000: 366). The screen-brain thinks in me; I am but a spiritual automaton, forced to think in accordance with the non-human connections it is organised by. In relation to this screen, therefore, my own brain is the passive recipient of an organisational transformation. More generally, then, as Deleuze writes in ‘The Brain Is the Screen’, ‘The circuits and linkages of the brain don’t pre-exist the stimuli, corpuscles and particles that trace them’ (2000: 366). But it is in What Is Philosophy? that the brain appears as the main emblem of thought – philosophical, scientific, artistic – in its irreducible dynamism, in its complicity with chaos. There, the brain appears as ‘nonobjectifiable’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 206), and it is the brain that thinks, and not the human being, which is only a result, a ‘crystallisation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 210). But now, despite the processual isomorphy of the embryo and the brain noted above, Deleuze will outline divergent schemata deriving from

206  Jon Roffe the respective cases. The embryo or egg names the dynamic moment in ontogenesis which is resolved in the established developmental sequence or biosocial segmentation of baby-child-adult. The brain, on the other hand, names both this dynamic moment and its result. Deleuze and Guattari are very clear about this point in What Is Philosophy?. On the one hand, in famous passages of the book’s conclusion, they assert the identity of the brain and thinking; indeed, they write that ‘the brain is the mind itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 211), the always transformable and transformed locus of novelty in human existence. On the other hand, the brain is situated on the side of the product, of what has fallen out of the dynamism of thought, that is, its precipitate: The image of thought implies a strict division between fact and right: what pertains to thought as such must be distinguished from contingent features of the brain or historical opinions. Quid juris? – can, for example, losing one’s memory or being mad belong to thought as such, or are they only contingent features of the brain that should be considered simple facts? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 37)

Using terminology drawn entirely from Ruyer, though to reach diametrically opposed conclusions in this case, Deleuze and Guattari write, It is not surprising that the brain, treated as a constituted object of science, can be an organ only of the formation and communication of opinion: this  is because step-by-step connections and centred integrations are still based on the limited model of recognition . . . and the biology of the brain is here aligned with the same postulates as the most stubborn logic. (1994: 209)14

Deleuze had already made this double point with respect to psychobiological development in The Logic of Sense, where ‘combat’ is once again at issue in ‘the contest of the mouth and the brain’ (1990: 222, 223). ‘Only the victory of the brain’ (1990: 223) makes thought possible, Deleuze remarks, but it equally gives rise to a second stupidity, and the capacity for human thought to mistake its nature and function.15 The brain is not naturally given but is the name for the equipotent screen or surface on the basis of which thought is composed, and, at the same time, the surface that becomes ‘an entire network similar to a system of channels’ (Deleuze 1991: 123) under the influence of habit and opinion (where the latter is the result of habit in the register of thought). Uniting these two aspects is, once again, the notion of equipotentiality.

Child, Baby, Embryo, Brain, Monster  207 Unlike the embryo, however, the brain – for both Ruyer and Deleuze – never arrives at an extended and qualified post-partum state. As the former memorably puts it in Neofinalism, ‘The brain is an embryo that has not finished its growth; the embryo is a brain that begins to organize itself before organizing the external world’ (Ruyer 2016: 69).

Conclusion: From the Brain to the Monster Deleuze’s convocations of the child, the baby, the embryo and the brain share at least one common goal: to insist upon the primacy of the advent of the new. Like Lyotard, the essential for Deleuze is to break with the image of the thinker traced from the very specific socio-historical and political phenomenon of ‘the average adult-white-heterosexualEuropean-male-speaking a standard language’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 105), the thinker who already (so it is said) thinks, and whose thought naturally seeks the true. The value of this break is to give back to thought what is most its own, namely its genesis in a natal stupidity or nonsense, ‘the zero point of thought’ (Deleuze 1990: 241). The season of thought is childhood, Lyotard tells us. But it is, more profoundly, the moment of embryogenesis of the embryologist, who forgets that they, too, are just an ‘embryo all grown up’ (embryon devenu adulte) (Ruyer 1958: 218); it is the persistence of polarised equipotentiality that is the brain, whose connections can be forged and reforged; it is the combat-baby. Lyotard said it: ‘Childhood is the monster of philosophers. It is also their accomplice. Childhood tells us that the mind is not given. But that it is possible’ (1992: 115). At the very root of the word ‘monster’ – if we pass back through its filiations with the abnormal, the divine, the repulsive and the admonition – is the root *men-, meaning ‘to think’. Even the childhood of the word ‘monster’ itself is found in thought. The point of this analysis was not, finally, to reverse the sequence, to insist that the adult (the philosopher, the lover of truth) arises from the child as the child arises from the embryo. It was instead to emphasise that the monstrous reality named by these various terms is always there, that every philosophy is a teratology written backwards, and what appears given and stable for thought can always be overturned in thought itself. To cite Lyotard one final time, writing to his own son, this time a Lyotard indiscernible from Deleuze: ‘The monster child is not the father of the man; it is what, in the midst of man, throws him off his course; it is the possibility or risk of being adrift. We always begin in the middle’ (1992: 116).

208  Jon Roffe

Notes   1. On Lyotard’s thought from this perspective, there exist a number of classic studies by Geoffrey Bennington (Lyotard: Writing the Event) and James Williams (Lyotard and the Political). Most recently, though, see the work of Ashley Woodward, such as the peerless Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition (2016).   2. I note at this point that the earliest remarks on this topic, found in Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), are rather more conventional and negative. At an important moment in that book, Deleuze writes that ‘True morality does not address itself to children in the family but rather to adults in the state. It does not involve the change of human nature but the invention of artificial and objective conditions in order for the bad aspects of this nature not to triumph’ (1991: 50). Here the child appears in the way that it does in most classical and modern philosophy, as a nascent state in which thought and agency have yet to develop. This is, of course, in a book devoted to the explication of Hume’s thought, but the respective positions of adult and child, or indeed of parent and child, are worth emphasising in this context.   3. The disparity between the boy and the girl in The Logic of Sense is also worth noting in this introductory vein. The central passage is the following: ‘This rediscovery of the Stoic sage is not restricted to the little girl. It is indeed true that Lewis Carroll detests boys in general. They have too much depth, and false depth at that, false wisdom, and animality. The male baby in Alice is transformed into a pig. As a general rule, only little girls understand Stoicism; they have a sense of the event and release a double. But it happens sometimes that a little boy is a stutterer and left-handed, and thus conquers sense as the double sense or direction of the surface’ (Deleuze 1990: 10). This differential emphasis on the child (and the disparagement of the animal that will later be valorised) should indicate that more than just the child – whether as a general category, a concept or a conceptual persona – is at stake for Deleuze, here and elsewhere.   4. On the figure of the inverted cripple, which is elaborated by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, see Derrida 1988: 35.   5. Deleuze’s analysis of the role of time in the cinema of Visconti (1989: 96–7) could be profitably related to this theme in Lyotard: ‘The “too-late” is not an accident that takes place in time but a dimension of time itself’ (1989: 96).   6. The contrast with the affirmation of the war machine in A Thousand Plateaus here is very significant. For my part, I side with Ron Bogue’s recent statements (which to my knowledge have not yet appeared in print) against the pertinence or strategic value of the ‘war machine’ terminology.   7. I leave aside in particular the rather unusual emphasis on quantity involved in the notion of the ‘small’. Of course, this smallness could be elaborated in non-quantitative, or at least intensive, fashion, as part of developing a concept of the baby, but in this thumbnail sketch, no such development takes place. Notably, this is a notion also invoked by Lyotard, who writes of an ‘infancy, which knows something about the as though, which knows about the pain of impotence and the complaint of being too small, of being there late (compared to others) and (as to its strength) of having arrived early, prematurely – which knows about broken promises, bitter disappointments, failings, and abandonment, but which also knows about dreaming, memory, question, invention, obstinacy, listening to the heart, love, and real openness to stories. Infancy is the state of the soul inhabited by something to which no answer is ever given’ (Lyotard 1999: 148; translation modified).

Child, Baby, Embryo, Brain, Monster  209   8. Not that puns are ever forgivable, but it might be said that the figure of the baby arrives late in the third trimester of Deleuze’s work: ‘Three periods, not bad going’ (Deleuze 1994: 135).   9. For an analysis of the historical and scientific context of Deleuze’s discussion of the egg in Difference and Repetition that also invokes Ruyer, see Roffe (forthcoming). 10. For a survey of Ruyer’s thought and his importance for Deleuze, see Bogue 2009. This piece remains the best survey on the topic, arguably in any language. 11. More detailed discussions of this aspect of Ruyer’s thought can be found in Colonna 2007, especially the section on ‘Vie’ (56–80), and in Louis and Louis 2014, especially the sections devoted to Élements de psycho-biologie and Neofinalism (101–10, 145–58). A critical overview that touches on embryogenesis can be found in Sauvagnargues 2014. 12. A memorable passage, which recounts the ‘road to Damascus’ level shock Driesch underwent when his early preformationist views were undone by his own experiments, can be found at Ruyer 1958: 30–2; see also Ruyer 1946: 73–4. 13. The inventive aspect of thematic activity has a series of correlates, as Ruyer points out in the second and third chapters of Neofinalism: freedom, existence, purposiveness or finality, labour, and value. See Ruyer 2016: 8–22. 14. All of this terminology is drawn directly from Ruyer’s critiques of mechanism and gestaltist theories in biology. 15. This point must not be confused with the remark made in A Thousand Plateaus, according to which ‘The brain is a population, a set of tribes tending towards two poles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 64). As in The Logic of Sense, this point is framed by reference to Perrier’s account of the polarisation between the brain and the mouth in the course of development. In fact, the two arguments constitute a neat illustration of the tetravalence of the assemblage: one axis runs from the mouth (as the capture of the body by the depths) to the brain (as the capacity for thought qua abstract machine); the other runs from the face (as form of expression, pace Leroi-Gourhan) to the hand (as form of content).

References Bennington, G. (1988), Lyotard: Writing the Event, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bogue, R. (2009), ‘Raymond Ruyer’, in G. Jones and J. Roffe (eds), Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 300–20. Colonna, F. (2007), Ruyer, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, ed. C. Boundas, trans. M. Seem with C. Stivale, London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (1991), Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. C. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. Smith and M. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2000), ‘The Brain Is the Screen’, in G. Flaxman (ed.), The Brain Is the Screen, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 365–74.

210  Jon Roffe Deleuze, G. (2007), Two Regimes of Madness, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1988), The Ear of the Other, ed. C. McDonald, trans. P. Kamuf and A. Ronell, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Fynsk, C. (2001), ‘Jean-François’ Infancy’, Yale French Studies, 99: 41–61. Louis, F. and J.-P. Louis (2014), La philosophie de Raymond Ruyer, Paris: Vrin. Lyotard, J.-F. (1991), Lectures d’enfance, Paris: Galilée. Lyotard, J.-F. (1992), The Postmodern Explained to Children, trans. J. Pefanis and M. Thomas, Sydney: Power Publications. Lyotard, J.-F. (1999), Toward the Postmodern, trans. R. Harvey and M. S. Roberts, New York: Humanity Books. Nothomb, A. (1993), Le sabotage amoureux, Paris: Albin Michel. Roffe, J. (forthcoming), ‘The Egg: Deleuze between Darwin and Ruyer’, in M. Bennett and T. Posteraro (eds), Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ruyer, R. (1946), Éléments de psycho-biologie, Paris: PUF. Ruyer, R. (1958), La genèse des formes vivantes, Paris: Flammarion. Ruyer, R. (2007), ‘Raymond Ruyer par lui-même’, Les Études philosophiques, 1: 1–12. Ruyer, R. (2016), Neofinalism, trans. A. Edlebi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sauvagnargues, A. (2014), ‘L’averse de sable, l’atome et l’embryon’, Critique, 804: 402–16. Spinoza, B. de (1985), The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. E. Curley, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tizard, B. (1959), ‘Theories of Brain Localisation from Flourens to Lashley’, Medical History, 3 (2): 132–45. Williams, J. (2000), Lyotard and the Political, New York: Routledge. Woodward, A. (2016), Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition: Reflections on Nihilism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Notes on Contributors

Markus P. J. Bohlmann is Professor of English at Seneca College, Toronto. He is the editor of Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings (Lexington, 2016) and co-editor of Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terror (McFarland, 2015). He is currently working on a collection on children and spirituality. Mat Fournier is an Assistant Professor of French at Ithaca College, New York. He obtained his PhD in Comparative Literature at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis in 2014. His main area of research is European Modernist Literature and his methods of analysis are informed by transgender studies, queer theory and continental philosophy, particularly the common work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. He is interested in exploring the articulation between gender studies and political theory in order to offer a biopolitical critique of capitalism. Anna Hickey-Moody is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2017–21) and RMIT University Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow (2016–20). From 2013 to 2016, she was the Head of the PhD in Arts and Learning and Director of the Centre for Arts and Learning at Goldsmiths College. She has also held teaching and research positions at the University of Sydney, Monash, and UniSA, Australia. Amongst her many publications are Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becomings (Sense, 2009), Youth, Arts and Education: Reassembling Subjectivity through Affect (Routledge, 2013) and her forthcoming book titled Deleuze and the Pedagogy of Gender: Masculinity and Methodology (Palgrave, 2019). Jane Newland is Associate Professor of French at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She is currently finishing a monograph entitled

212  Notes on Contributors Deleuzian Readings of Children’s Literature: On a Witch’s Broom focusing on the children’s texts written by authors who fascinated Deleuze. She has published articles in journals such as Modern and Contemporary France, French Cultural Studies, International Research in Children’s Literature and Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. Helen Palmer is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing in the Department of Humanities at Kingston University London. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2014). She has recently published work on interdisciplinary collaborative practice from a new materialist perspective (Ruukku 9, 2018), and some poetry in the Minnesota Review (88, 2017). She is currently writing a book called Queer Defamiliarisation and New Materialism (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press) and a novel called Pleasure Beach. Anna Powell retired from her post as Reader in English and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University to become an Honorary Research Fellow. She is the author of Deleuze and Horror Film and Deleuze, Altered States and Film and co-author of Teaching the Gothic. She continues to publish articles and chapters on Deleuze, film and literature, its affects and effects. Among her recent research topics are Jan Svankmajer and H.  P. Lovecraft. Anna is a member of Deleuze Studies and Dark Arts editorial boards and founded A/V, the online journal for Deleuzerelated studies. As well as running public study groups on Deleuze and Guattari, she enjoys creative writing. Jon Roffe is the co-editor of a number of volumes on twentieth-century and contemporary French thought. He is the author of Badiou’s Deleuze (Acumen, 2012), Abstract Market Theory (Palgrave, 2015), Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and the forthcoming Works of Gilles Deleuze (re.press). He is also the co-author of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and Practising with Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Chris Stover has published articles on and around Deleuze and Guattari in Perspectives of New Music, Music Theory Online, Media and Culture and elsewhere, and is co-editor of Rancière and Music, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. He is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Arizona State University and an active trombonist and composer in New York City and internationally.

Notes on Contributors  213 Kenneth Surin obtained his PhD in Philosophy and Theology from the University of Birmingham in 1977. He taught in city schools around Cambridge (UK) for seven years before getting his first academic job at the University of Gloucestershire. In 1987 he took up a position in the Department of Religion at Duke University, North Carolina. He moved to the Program in Literature in 1992. He is currently Professor of Literature, with a joint appointment in the Department of Religion and an adjunct appointment in the German Studies PhD Program. He is the author of 200 articles and book chapters. His most recent book is Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order (Duke University Press). Ian Thomas is a researcher at the Administrative Data Research Centre Wales/Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods, based at Cardiff University. He has a varied research background including statistical analysis, homelessness and housing, sexuality studies, Deleuzian studies and digital research methods. His current research is on the digital sexual practices of men who have sex with men. He has a particular interest in the application of posthuman theory to research design and methods. Ohad Zehavi received his PhD from the School of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University; in his dissertation he studied the role of child figures in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. He has an MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. He teaches at Tel Aviv University, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art. He lectures and writes on various issues in visual culture, continental philosophy and childhood studies.

Index

adulthood binary developmental model of transition to, 1 childhood blocks and the destabilisation of the developmental stream towards, 184–5, 186–7, 192 growing-up in children’s literature, 163, 169–70, 171–2, 175, 176, 187–8 internalisation of attachment behaviours, 34 neurotic behaviours in, 31–2, 35 teleological movement ‘up’ to, 146, 179–80 aesthetics the child as an aesthetic figure, 9 knowledge inquiry through, 156–7 music as an aesthetic experience, 150–1, 158 affect affection-images, 91–4 affective experience of music-making, 158 affective intensification, 129 applied to Little Hans, 5–7 and the body, 49, 50, 133, 135, 156, 157 concept of, 130, 133 and duration, 133–4 good/bad distinctions and, 134, 135 states of joy and sadness, 135–7, 141–2 affective atmospheres, 129, 140, 141–2 ageing bi-directionality ageing of Hatty (Tom’s Midnight Garden), 170 incorporeal ageing of the Pevensie children (Narnia chronicles), 168, 169–70, 175–6 agoraphobia, 35

Ainsworth, Mary, 33, 34 Aion bi-directionality of, 170 Chronos-Aion distinction, 164, 168, 174 concept of, 167, 172 in The Dark is Rising sequence, 173–4 incorporeal ageing of the Pevensie children, 168, 169–70, 175–6 as non-linear chronology, 169 see also Chronos Alice (Lewis Carroll) as an adolescent, 73, 78 alimentary obsessions of, 75–6 as becoming subject, 64–5 as coloniser figure, 77–9 as conceptual persona, 65 consumption of one’s own surface, 76–7 in Deleuzian thought, 66–7 as the embodiment of sense, 68 as femme-enfant (woman-child), 74 the growing/shrinking simultaneity of, 68–9, 170 as a hermunculus in The Logic of Sense, 84 language/corporeality relationship, 65–7 loss of her proper name, 79–80 schizophrenic subjectivity in, 79 as the surface of difference, 67–9 anal, 18, 31, 101 analysts see psychoanalysts Anderson, Ben, 129, 130 anorexia, 75–6 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari) body without organs, 50

Index  215 the child as a metaphysical being, 48 de-Oedipalisation of the social sphere, 4, 42, 57 the family and Oedipalisation, 2, 30, 154 fluxes/flows, 24 the Holy Family, 116–17 Little Hans, 44 partial objects, 15, 18, 20 the penis, 3 as political philosophy, 52 anxiety, 133 Artaud, Antonin, 18, 50, 59, 71, 74, 205 asexuality, 1, 129, 132 Ash, James, 130 assemblage applied to Little Hans, 5–7 the baby as, 19–20 the child as assemblage of assemblages, 26 and the child-adult relationship, 7 concept of, 42 contingent meaning in, 7 of ecosophic objects, 22–3 gender assemblage, 121–4 machinic assemblages, 5–6, 122 representational assemblages, 116 Summer as fruit assemblage (‘Alice in Prague’, Carter), 81–2 transgender children as collective assemblages, 116 atmospheres affective atmospheres, 129, 140, 141–2 concept of, 130 as durations, 131, 133–4 formation of, 129 in relation to movement, 131 in relation to objects, 130–1 attachment behaviours Ainsworth theories on attachment behaviours, 34 Bowlby’s theories on attachment behaviours, 33 infant attachment and maternal deprivation, theory of, 33 of Little Hans and his mother, 36, 37 and the mother/infant bond, 33–4 autism Deligny’s work with, 102–3 hodological spaces, 102 Little Joey case study (Bettelheim), 99–101 in The Shining, 99 spatial stasis of, 99–100

babies as assemblage, 19–20 as distinct from the child, 199–200 as emblematic of existence-as-combat, 199–200 at the mother’s breast, 13, 15, 17, 70–1 the bachelor figure, 115 Bacon, Francis, 130 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 16 Barrie, J. M., 187; see also Peter Pan (Barrie) ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ (1997), 60–1 becoming adolescence as the process of gendered becoming, 73 Alice as becoming subject, 64–5 become-musicking, 146, 156, 158 becoming-animal, 112–13, 115, 124 becoming-feminine, 132–3 becoming-horse of Little Hans, 49, 51–2, 54, 56, 98 becoming-minor, 156 and the conceptualisation of the child as potentiality, 180–2 Danny’s series of becomings in The Shining, 106–7 as deterritorialisation of Oedipus, 42, 44, 56, 57 of father becomes-son/son becomesfather, 60–1 the growing/shrinking simultaneity of Alice, 69, 170 and the physicality of the body, 51 through speed and duration, 131 becoming-child childhood blocks and, 185 and child-ness, 183–4 in Deleuzian thought, 197 and molecular ontology, 58–9, 149–50, 185 and music-making, 149–50 play as, 148 as a political procedure, 58, 59–61 separation from the parent-function, 57–8, 59, 60 in A Thousand Plateaus, 58, 181 worldling and, 192–3 Bergson, Henri, 91, 131, 150, 151, 156, 164–5 Bettelheim, Bruno, 99–100 binary binary developmental model of transition to adulthood, 1 gender as a binary position, 117, 132, 140, 141–2

216  Index block/bloc (term), 184 Blum, Virginia L., 1–2, 180 the body and affect, 49, 50, 133, 135, 156, 157 becoming and the physicality of the body, 51 bodily intensification, 129–30 corporeal Chronos, 163–4 existential territories of, 25 incorporeal ageing, 168, 169–70, 175–6 introjection of partial objects into, 17 language/corporeality relationship, 65–7 longitude and latitude of, 49 metaphysical theft of the potential ‘n sexes’, 56 mind-body dualism, 72 in relation to affect, 133, 135 Spinozan concept of, 48–9 states of joy and sadness, 135–7, 141–2 as a vehicle for drives, 13 virtual incorporeal universes of value, 25 body without organs and the cartographical practices of children, 50 as childhood block, 51 consumption of one’s own surface, 76–7 and partial objects, 18, 50 the real and material maternal placenta as a metonym for, 50–1, 55 term, 18 Bohlmann, Markus, 104, 146, 169 Bowlby, John, 33–4 boy-child, 2, 3, 30, 31, 32, 188 the brain Deleuzian concept of, 206–7 as dynamic self-forming being, 205 as dynamic surface, 204, 206 as embryo, 207 equipotentiality of, 204–5 Lashley’s neurological experiments, 204 Buchanan, Ian, 2–3, 5, 6, 129 capacity to act, 156, 199 Carrington, Leonora, 77 Carroll, Lewis childlike state of (Woolf), 75 eating habits of, 74–5 hybrid words of, 16–17 as proto-structuralist, 66–8 as proto-surrealist, 73–4 see also Alice (Lewis Carroll)

Carter, Angela, 80–2 cartographies and affective intensity, 96–7 affective map of Little Hans, 96 cartographical practices of children, 49–50, 53, 90 the child’s affective fields and, 101–2 defined, 49 of ecosophic objects, 22–6 hodological spaces, 102 Klein’s tracing of Little Hans’ geopolitical maps, 96 as psychic mobilisation, 96 Castañeda, Claudia, 180–1, 185 castration chemical castration option for transgender children, 120–1 Freudian notion of, 16, 37 castration anxiety of the boy-child, 3 and father-son relationships, 31, 32 Lacan’s adherence to, 16 in Little Hans, 5, 36, 37, 43, 54, 56 child figure as an entity-in-the-making, 180–2 as an expression of geological forces, 154 generative child, 107–8 ghostly gay child figure, 125 innocent child, 110–11, 113, 114, 115, 128, 131–2, 134–5, 141, 191–2 as a negative figure, 198 political, 53 as a positive figure, 198 as representative of the social order, 116 childhood adult-child interactions over, 179–80 binary developmental model of, 1 the child as Father to the man, 180, 182 Deleuzian, 2 as an event, 196–7 family-child relationship in psychoanalysis, 2–3 in Lyotard’s work, 196, 198 notions of, 114–15 and the unknown, 197 Victorian conceptions of, 40, 128 childhood blocks adult/child connection within, 184–5, 192 body without organs as, 51 and childhood memories, 182, 184–6 in children’s literature, 171–2, 175 concept of, 7

Index  217 deterritorialisation of the adult from the Oedipal family, 182–3 and the parent-function, 57 child-ness and becoming-child, 183–4 concept of, 7, 183 children, term, 113–14 children’s literature childhood blocks in, 171–2, 175 growing-up in, 163, 169–70 time in, 162 see also The Dark is Rising sequence (Cooper); Narnia chronicles (Lewis); Peter Pan (Barrie); Tom’s Midnight Garden (Pearce) child-time concept of, 166 in Narnia chronicles (Lewis), 167 in Tom’s Midnight Garden (Pearce), 166–7 Chronos Chronos disrupted, 165–7 Chronos-Aion distinction, 164, 168, 174 concept of, 163 corporeal Chronos, 163–4 in The Dark is Rising sequence, 173 as the present, 163–4 see also Aion Chrysippos, 30–1, 37 Cinema I: The Movement-Image (Deleuze), 91 Cinema II: The Time-Image (Deleuze), 170–1, 205 colonisation, 78–9 combat babies as emblematic of existence-ascombat, 199 concept of, 199 between the mouth and the brain, 206 conceptual personae Alice as, 65 the child as, 7–8, 9 defined, 7 Little Girl, 48 in relation to the philosopher, 8–9 Cooper, Susan, 162; see also The Dark is Rising sequence (Cooper) Cornell, Joseph, 166 corporeal see body countertransference, 20–1 Cretella, Michelle, 110–11, 120, 122, 125

Chronos in, 173 return to Chronos, 174–5 death drive, 42, 108, 116, 117 Deleuze, Gilles critique of psychoanalysis, 2, 14–15, 41 as metaphysician, 48 philosophical drive of, 47–8 political philosophy of, 52 on Winnicott’s affinity with Nietzsche, 19 see also individual works Deligny, Fernand, 102–3 desire of the individualised social organism, 42 within the Oedipal family structure, 3–4 as productive and transpersonal, 3–4 as tyrannical complete object, 3 desiring-machines concept of, 42 defined, 124 fullness of, 117 Little Joey case study (Bettelheim), 99 and Oedipus, 4 and partial objects, 15, 16, 124 the psyche as, 17 deterritorialisation of the adult from the Oedipal family, 182–3 adult/child distinction and, 184–5 as anti-Oedipal programme, 42, 44, 56, 57 as the line of flight, 106–7 Orphan figure, 57, 182 see also reterritorialisation diagrammatic components, 89 difference, 103 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze), 47, 68, 198, 200, 201 Driesch, Hans, 202, 204 drives and the child’s body, 13 death drive, 42, 108, 116, 117 drive-gratification, 17 object-drive relationship, 13–14 relational model of, 17 theory of, 13 Winnicott’s movement away from Freudian-Kleinian drive structures, 19

The Dark is Rising sequence (Cooper) Aion in, 173–4

ecosophic objects, 22–6 Edelman, Lee, 116–17

218  Index the egg the body without gender as, 126 and the body without organ, 50–1, 125 the Dogon egg, 50, 200 embryogenesis, 201–3 embryonic eggs of Difference and Repetition, 200, 201 fertilised egg, 202 Little Joey case study (Bettelheim), 101 and ontogenesis, 200–1, 206 the ego fixed ego of a subject, 3 Freud’s definition of, 83 and phrase ‘My child is transgender’, 116, 117 reterritorialisation of Peter’s ego (Peter Pan), 188, 189, 192 embodiment, 7, 68, 73, 74, 114, 181 the embryo developmental themes and, 203–4 embryogenesis, 200–1, 202 equipotentiality of, 202–3 enfant (term), 113, 114 epistemology, 2, 66, 80, 92, 122 Essays Critical and Clinical (Deleuze), 64, 68, 198 ethics affective atmospheres and, 129, 134–5, 142 ethically engaged citizens, 153, 156 and experiences of sadness and joy, 135–7, 141–2 good/bad distinctions and, 134 existential territories, 25 families difference and repetition within the father-son relationship, 105 family-child relationship in psychoanalysis, 2–3, 53 father becomes-son/son becomes-father relationship, 60–1 the Father-function and Motherfunction in Little Hans, 54–7 impact on emotional disturbances, 33 as an instrument of the social apparatus, 3 Little Hans within his family system, 36–7 nuclear heterosexual family unit, 1–2, 3, 31, 94, 96 as a political fabrication, 53–4 in relation to the social, 2–3 as site of Oedipalisation, 2–3

triangulation of the parent-function, 56–7 see also Oedipal family; parentfunction fiction see children’s literature flows/fluxes, 20, 23, 24 Foucault, Michel the Deluezian century, 2 on the discursive expansion of sexuality, 38–41 incitement to discourse, 38 repressive hypothesis, 40–1, 42–4 on sexual repression, 38–9 Freeley, Dustin, 104–6 Freud, Sigmund focus on the child, 2 hypothesis of sexual repression, 38–40 neurosis and infantile sexuality, 31–2 object-drive relationship, 13–14 Oedipus Rex and, 4 sexual sciences and, 41 use of Greek myth, 29–30 see also Little Hans; Oedipus complex; psychoanalysis futurity, 115–18 gender adolescence as the process of gendered becoming, 73 as a binary position, 117, 132, 140, 141–2 of children as partial objects, 125–6 gender assemblage, 121–4 ghostly gay child figure, 125 hermunculus, 83 homunculus, 82–3 in relation to sexuality, 114 Summer as fruit assemblage (‘Alice in Prague’, Carter), 81–2 see also transgender children generative child, 107–8 Ginsberg, Alan, 129–30, 140–1, 142 Gothic child as generative trope, 95 isolation of, 91 monstrosity and, 104–5 in movement and time, 91 as threat to patriarchy, 95–6 trauma and psychic abilities, 95 as vector of affect, 90 as victim/monster, 94–5 Gothic cinema, 89–90 groovology, 153 Grosz, Elizabeth, 72–3, 76, 83

Index  219 Guattari, Félix critique of psychoanalysis, 2, 14–15, 41 relationship with R. D. Laing, 22 see also individual works hermunculus, 83 Herthel, Jessica, 118, 119, 121, 122 heteronormativity as the acceptable standard, 1–3, 39 adult discourses of children within, 132, 133, 134–6, 141 and Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, 41–2, 43 and the medical reterritorialisation of transgender children, 119, 123 nuclear heterosexual family unit, 1–3 Hickey-Moody, Anna, 78, 90, 97, 156, 157, 169 The History of Sexuality 1 (Foucault), 40–1 hodological spaces, 102 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 112–13 homosexuality, 39–40 homunculus, 82–3 The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey (Carver), 95 horses as assemblage of affects in Little Hans, 5–6, 42 n2, 49, 50, 54 becoming-horse of Little Hans, 49, 51–2, 54, 56, 98 biting by and Little Hans’ castration anxiety, 5, 32 discussion of (case study), 138, 139–40 Little Hans’ trauma due to the death of, 35, 36 as ‘widdlers’ in Little Hans, 5, 44 in ‘Wish to Become a Red Indian’ (Kafka), 51–2, 56 houses connections to a universe, 189 Wendy as synonymous with the house (Peter Pan), 188–9 ‘Howl’ (Ginsberg), 129–30, 140–1, 142 howl (term), 130 ‘howl’ encountered, case study, 137–40 I Am Jazz (Herthel and Jennings), 118–19, 121, 123 idea-image, 203 identity children’s identity-formation through music and play, 147–8 identification with the aggressor, 32

identity-formation as temporal enactment, 147 image-based approaches, 89–90 images maze imagery in The Shining, 89, 92, 95, 102, 107 the movement-image in The Shining, 91 time-images in The Shining, 91–4 infant/mother bond adult neurosis and infantile sexuality, 31–2 as survival mechanism, 33, 34 infantile sexuality, 31–2 innocence of childhood, 110–11, 113, 114, 115, 128, 131–2, 134–5, 141, 191–2 term, 191 intensity atmospheres of, 129 changes in, 131 internal objects, 17–18 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 38 ‘The Interpretation of Utterances’ (Deleuze), 54 introjection, 17, 32 Jenner, Caitlyn, 118 Jennings, Jazz, 118–19, 121, 123 joy, 135–7, 141–2 Kafka, Franz, 51, 56 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari), 115, 171 Kant, Immanuel, 197 Keil, Charles, 150, 152–6, 158 Kincaid, James, 78, 128–9, 134, 141 kinder (term), 113, 114 Klein, Melanie internal objects, 17–18 partial objects, 17, 18, 70–1, 124 phantasy, 17 play-analysis, 18–19, 70 primacy of object relations, 69–70 within the psychoanalytic tradition, 2, 14 theatre of terror of the baby at the mother’s breast, 17, 70–1 tracings of Little Hans’ geopolitical maps, 96 violent world of object relations, 70 Kubrick, Stanley, 89

220  Index labyrinth, 90, 172 Lacan, Jacques adherence to Freudian notion of castration, 16 Freeley’s reading of for The Shining, 105–6 Great Signifier, 121 language-like character of the unconscious, 16 mirror-stage, 99 and missing partial objects, 15–16 Laios, 30–1, 36–7 language to absorb (verb), 69 children (term), 113–14 children’s ability to speak for themselves, 114–15 as corrupt and corrupting, 190–1 hybrid words of Lewis Carroll, 16–17 the infinitive verb and the event of language, 68–9 innocence (term), 191 ‘The Interpretation of Utterances’ (2006), 54 materiality of, 30–1, 71 the phrase ‘My child is transgender’, 116, 117 play (term), 146, 148 polyvocality, 16 pre-eminence of expressivity, 16–17 in relation to corporeality, 65–7 speech acts in Little Hans, 55–6 Stoic lekton, 68 transversality for the treatment of catatonic patients, 21–2, 24 of the unconscious, 16 Lewis, C. S., 162; see also Narnia chronicles (Lewis) lines of flight away from heteronormative ideals, 123, 140 and de/territorialisation, 154 and the Oedipal narrative, 42, 106, 190, 198 and participatory artistic creation, 152 in The Shining, 103, 106–7 Little Hans affective map of, 96 becoming-horse of Little Hans, 49, 51–2, 54, 56, 98 the body and affect in, 49, 50 castration anxiety, 5, 36, 37, 43, 54, 56 concepts of masculinity from, 37 Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of, 44 Deleuzian readings of, 42

and the family system, 36–7 the Father-function and Motherfunction in, 54–7 within Freudian psychoanalytic theory, 5, 29, 32–3 Freud’s recording of the case study, 34–5 horses as assemblage of affects in, 5–6, 42 n2, 49, 50, 54 as isolated Gothic child, 91 Little Hans’ trauma due to the death of the horse, 35, 36 misinterpreted speech of, 53 the Oedipus complex and, 5, 29, 44–5 Olga-Little Hans attachment, 36, 37 phobia as politically induced, 56 within psychoanalytic theory, 5 and the repressive hypothesis, 43 schizo-analytic reading of, 5–7 speech acts in, 55–6 theories of childhood sexuality, 29–30, 32, 37–8, 43 tracings of Little Hans’ geopolitical maps by Klein, 96 triangulation of, 54–5, 56 widdler, use of the term, 5, 35–6, 43, 44, 56 Little Joey case study (Bettelheim), 99–101 The Logic of Sense Alice (Lewis Carroll), 68, 170 Chronos-Aion distinction, 164, 168 heterosexual subjectivity, 43, 44 Lewis Carroll, 16–17, 65, 79, 83 readings of Klein, 18, 69–70 Stoic thought in, 48 Lyotard, Jean-François, 196–8, 207 machinic assemblages, 5–6, 122 masculinity, concepts of, 37 masturbation, 39 maternal deprivation, 33 medicine medical reterritorialisation of transgender children, 118–20, 123 pharmaceutical puberty blockers (chemical castration), 120–1 Melville, Herman, 60 memories, childhood and the childhood block, 182, 184–6 and the Oedipus complex, 71 in Tom’s Midnight Garden (Pearce), 171 metamodelisation, 22–6 metaphysics Deleuzian, 48, 52–3 Spinoza’s influence on Deleuze, 48

Index  221 molecular ontology, 58–9, 149–50, 185 monism, 69 monstrosity of the Gothic child, 104–5 Gothic child as victim/monster, 94–5 Gothic child-monster as threat to patriarchy, 95–6 monstrous camera-eye in The Shining, 91–2, 94, 103 monstrous child figures in The Shining, 104–6 morality and children’s sexualities, 129, 132, 133, 135 an ethical approach to, 134–5, 141–2 moral decadence and the social body, 110 and paidia, 156 and transcendent value systems, 134 and transgender children, 122 music in a child-educational setting, 157–8 children’s identity-formation through, 147–8 multiplicities of the term ‘play’, 146–7 ‘paideia into paidia’, 147, 153, 155–6, 157–8 participatory discrepancies of, 152, 155 as a participatory process, 152–6 in relation to time, 145–6, 150–1, 158 reterritorialisation through, 153 value of music-play, 148–9 musicking become-musicking, 146, 156, 158 as groovology, 153 as partial object, 155 pedagogical applications of, 158 the play of musicking, 149 as a relational act, 146, 150, 157 and relationships with non-human agents, 147–8, 155 Narnia chronicles (Lewis) as carnivalesque texts, 168–9 child-time in, 167 Chronos disrupted, 165–6, 167 corporeal Chronos in, 163–4 incorporeal ageing of the Pevensie children, 168, 169–70, 175–6 return to Chronos, 174–5 neurosis, adult as function of sexual abuse, 35 and infantile sexuality, 31–2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19, 48 Nosferatu (1922), 89–90

nuclear heterosexual family, 1–2, 3, 31, 94, 96 objects ecosophic objects, 22–6 internal objects, 17–18 object-drive relationship, 13–14 primacy of object relations in Klein, 69–70 psychic well-being in relation to, 14–15 in relation to atmospheres, 130–1 relational model of, 17 the transitional object, 71 violent world of object relations in Klein, 70 see also partial objects Oedipal family adherence to in psychoanalysis, 2–4 Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of, 2–3 individualised model of subjectivity and, 42 and the repression of desire, 3–4 schizoid position and, 18 Oedipal lens, 5 Oedipal matrix, 3–4 Oedipus, 29–31 Oedipus complex childhood memory, 171 and the creation of Son and Daughter, 57 Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of, 30, 42 familial triangulation as structural Oedipus, 116–17 and Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, 42–4 Freud’s development of, 4, 29–30, 31, 37–8, 43 and Little Hans, 5, 29, 44–5 more in transgender section? 128 Oedipal readings of Peter Pan, 190 within psychoanalytic theory, 4–5 schizoanalytical deconstruction of, 57 Oedipus Rex, 4, 30 opsigns, 91, 98 order-words, 55–6, 60 parent-function Anti-Oedipus as an attempt to de-Oedipalise the social sphere, 57 and the deconstruction of the Oedipus complex, 57 dissolution of the father-function, 60–1 the Father-function and Motherfunction in Little Hans, 54–7

222  Index parent-function (cont.) separation from by the becoming-child, 57–8, 59, 60 triangulation of, 56–7 parents within the child’s social milieu, 53 transgender children in relation to, 115–16 Parnet, Claire, 184–5 partial genders, 124–6 partial objects in Anti-Oedipus, 15, 18, 20 as an apersonal agent of production and anti-production, 15–16 applied to childhood development, 26 bad partial objects, 18 and the body without organs, 18, 50 children’s connections to, 124–5, 154 children’s gender as, 125–6 as derived from a flow, 20 Kleinian concept of, 17, 18, 70–1, 124 ‘missing’ partial objects, 15–16 musicking as, 155 plasticity of, 21 in relation to desiring machines, 15, 16, 124 in relation to the patient-analyst relationship, 20–1 as stages on a developmental trajectory, 14–15 Winnicott’s transitional objects, 20 patriarchy corporeality of language and, 65 threat to from the Gothic childmonster, 95–6 Pearce, Philippa, 162; see also Tom’s Midnight Garden (Pearce) pederasty, 30, 31 penis envy, 3 penises chemical castration and, 120–1 as widdlers in Little Hans, 5, 35–6, 43, 44, 56 Peter Pan (Barrie) Oedipal readings of, 190 Peter as wounded figure, 187–8, 189–90 reterritorialisation of Peter’s ego, 188, 189, 192 Wendy as synonymous with the house, 188–9 phallic, 26, 37, 105, 122–3 phallus, 3–4, 5, 16, 120–1 phantasy, 17

phyla machinic phyla, 24–5 as one of Guattari’s four functors, 23 play as becoming-child, 148 children’s identity-formation through, 147–8 etymological play in Deleuze and Guattari, 147 ‘paideia into paidia’, 156 as a participatory process, 152 term, 146, 148 therapeutic use of, 18–19, 70 value of music-play, 148–9 Polan, D., 7 polyvocality, 16 psychoanalysis application of the Oedipus concept to children, 4–5 the child as Father to the man, 180, 182 Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of, 2, 14–15, 41 family-child relationship, 2–3 focus on the child, 2 maintenance of Oedipal family, 4 nuclear heterosexual family unit, 1–3 transference, 14 psychoanalysts, 4, 14–15, 19, 20–1, 41, 44 psychoanalytic boy, within the Oedipal family, 2–3, 5, 31–2, 37, 44; see also Little Hans queer child becoming-animal, 115 as every child, 114–15 as an orphan figure, 115 in relation to transgender children, 116 see also transgender children rationality/representation nexus, 196–7 the Refrain, 186, 189 regime of judgement, 198–9 relationalities, 157 repetition concept of, 103 difference and repetition within the father-son relationship, 105 in the Gothic, 103–4 the Grady ghosts as Oedipal repetition, 103–4 and thanatos (death instinct), 103 representation/rationality nexus, 196–7 repression and adult neurosis, 31–2

Index  223 by the Catholic Church, 38 and childhood sexuality, 38–9, 40 Freud’s hypothesis of, 38 and heterosexual subjectivity, 41–2, 43 in the Oedipal family, 3–4 and the Oedipus complex, 42–4 repressive hypothesis, 40–2 and sexuality, 44 through the legal system, 38–9 and Victorian society, 38, 39–41 reterritorialisation medical reterritorialisation of transgender children, 118–20, 123 of Peter’s ego in Peter Pan, 188, 189, 192 through music, 153 see also deterritorialisation rhizome cartography as rhizomatic practice, 49 in Little Hans, 44, 98, 102 time and, 163, 166–7, 169, 175 Rivière, Joan, 77 Ruyer, Raymond, 201–4, 207 sad passions, 129, 136–7, 140, 198 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 16, 66 schizoanalysis, 2, 57 schizoid body, 18 schizoids and countertransference, 20–1 transversalities in the treatment of, 21–2, 24 scream (term), 130 semiosis, 5–6 separation anxiety, 187, 189 sexual abuse, 30, 35 sexual desire, 31–2, 44, 70 sexual subjectivities, 43, 128–9, 133 sexuality of children adult-child encounters and moral panic, 133 affective atmospheres of, 141–2 becoming-feminine, 132–3 childhood sexual development and the Little Hans case study, 29–30, 32, 37–8, 43 children’s formative stages of, 128–9 discursive expansion of, 38–41 and genital pleasure, 43–4 infantile sexuality in Freudian theory, 31–2 innocence of childhood, 110–11, 113, 114, 115 policing of, 40 in relation to gender, 114

and social power relations, 41 as a state of flux in children, 129, 131, 132, 135 states of joy and sadness, 135–7 transition from sexual pleasure to sexual repression, 40–1 Victorian conceptions of childhood, 38, 39–41 see also Oedipus complex The Shining (Kubrick) autism or possession of Danny, 99–103 Danny as generative child, 107–8 Danny within the Gothic tradition, 95 Danny’s series of becomings, 106–7 enactment of regression by Jack, 95, 105 facial close-ups of Danny, 100, 101 Gothic tropes in, 90, 94 the Grady ghosts as Oedipal repetition, 103–4 internal and external ‘shines’, 90–1, 98–9, 103, 106–7 liminality of Danny’s visions, 90–1 maze imagery, 89, 92, 95, 102, 107 monstrous camera-eye in, 91–2, 94, 103 monstrous child figures, 104–6 the movement-image in, 91 repetition and difference in, 103–6 spatial stasis of Danny, 99–100 temporal and spatial anomalies, 95 time-images, 91–4 trauma and psychic abilities, 95 use of light in, 89 signs, 6–7 skin, double function of, 76–7 Small, Christopher, 145–6 sonsigns, 91, 96 Sophocles (Oedipus Rex), 4, 30 Spinoza, Baruch concept of the body, 48–9, 204 influence on Deleuze’s metaphysical thought, 48 rejection of Good-Evil moral order, 134 Spinozist child becoming of, 51–2 body without organs, 50–1 cartographical practices of, 49–50 as a metaphysical being, 48 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 114, 125, 169, 188 Stoicism, 48, 66, 67, 68 Strange Situation test, 34 sub-representational difference, 199–200

224  Index surface Alice as the surface of difference, 67–9 the brain as a dynamic surface, 204, 206 consumption of one’s own surface (Alice), 76–7 symbolism, 5 territorialisation of signs, 7 of transference, 14 see also deterritorialisation; reterritorialisation thanatos, 103 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari) Aion in, 167 becoming-animal, 112–13 becoming-child, 58, 181 Chronos, 163 fluxes/flows, 24 Little Hans, 5–6, 43, 44 as political philosophy, 52 Spinozist metaphysical child, 48 worldling, 186 time in children’s literature, 162 child-time, 166–7 growing-up in children’s literature, 163, 169–70, 171–2, 175, 176, 187–8 identity-formation as temporal enactment, 147 in relation to music, 145–6, 150–1, 158 temporal and spatial anomalies in The Shining, 95 see also Aion; Chronos Tom’s Midnight Garden (Pearce) bi-directional ageing of Hatty, 170 childhood blocks in, 171–2 childhood memory, 171 child-time in, 166–7 Chronos disrupted, 164–5, 167 corporeal Chronos in, 163–4 return to Chronos, 174–5 transference Guattari’s critique of, 14 in Winnicott’s formulations, 20–1 transgender children ability to speak for themselves, 114–15 and becoming-animal, 124 brain in wrong body theory, 119, 121 as collective assemblages, 116 Daily Signal commentary on, 110–11 as disruptive, 111 as every child, 114–15

within the familial triangulation, 116–18 within the family context, 115–16 medical reterritorialisation of, 118–20, 123 as referred to in the plural, 115, 123–4 in relation to the queer child, 116 sickness-decadence metaphor for, 110–12 as war machines, 111–12, 123 within the Western gender assemblage, 121–4 see also queer child transgression, 129 transitional objects, 20 transversality, 16, 21–2, 24 triangulation familial triangulation as structural Oedipus, 116–17 within the family, 2–3 of Little Hans, 54–5, 56 of the parent-function, 56–7 as reinforced by psychoanalysis, 53, 54 utterance adult interpretations of the child’s speech, 54–6 through an Oedipal lens, 5, 53 Villani, Arnauld, 147, 156, 157 war, 199 war machines in A Thousand Plateaus, 52 transgender children as, 111–12, 123 ‘What Children Say’ (Deleuze), 52–3 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari), 8, 59, 205, 206 widdlers (Little Hans), 5, 35–6, 43, 44, 56 Winnicott, D. W. affinity with Nietzsche, 19 analyst-patient paradigm, 14 classificatory scheme of, 20 countertransference, 20–1 and the Freudian-Kleinian drive structures, 19 pre-self disorders of psychotics and schizoids, 20 on the psychogenetic environment, 19–20 the transitional object, 71 transitional objects, 20 Woolf, Virginia, 75 worldling, 185–6, 192