Child as Method: Othering, Interiority and Materialism [1 ed.] 1032255730, 9781032255736

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‘This book is both a culmination and expansion of Erica Burman’s previous, classic critiques of transcendental claims about the child and development: Burman here proposes and demonstrates “Child as Method” as an way of opening up and thinking through a range of naturalised and naturalising claims both overtly and obliquely in relation to the child, allowing a questioning of a hugely impressive range of theoretical, political and ideological assumptions underpinning key concerns of our time, including (post/colonial) power, the environment, gender and sexualities and “new” and “old” materialisms. This book is both for readers interested in truly original thinking about childhood but also anyone interested in truly original thinking about the state of “theory” today.’ Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Professor of Critical Theory and Director of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media (CIRCL) and the M(Res.) in Children’s Literature, Department of English Literature, University of Reading, UK

‘Erica Burman’s superb analysis proposes childhood as threshold to and landscape for the politics of psycho-social life. With great care, honesty, and acumen, Child as Method juxtaposes critical readings of literature, memoir, historical accounts, and anthropological debates on materialism, political economy, and humannon-human exchange to deftly construct affecting frameworks for anti-racist, feminist investigations of ‘the child.’ Burman’s choice of topics is as expansive as her vocabulary. With nuance, Burman invites readers to consider new analogies that engage childhood as ground zero from which conceptions of gender, race, culture, and sexuality orient and confuse social, political, national, and educational practices. This is a brave and important intervention that works between fissures of political and psychical economies, with keen focus on ethical relations that tie the vicissitudes of childhood studies to contemporary interpretive challenges and political urgencies of care faced today.’ Deborah P. Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at York University, Canada, and author of When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning

‘This book is powerful and provocative. It lays out in richly textured detail why the analytic framework of “Child as method” is essential for understanding the significance of childhoods for politics and societies. Through careful and subtle diagnoses of established assumptions, Burman’s brilliant work transforms how to think about decolonial, feminist, materialist, and posthumanist theory as well as scholarship across the social sciences and humanities. This is a must-read for anyone concerned about children and their importance for today’s world.’ John Wall, Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Childhood Studies, and Director of the Childism Institute, Rutgers University Camden, USA, author of Give Children the Vote: On Democratizing Democracy (2022)

‘Moral panics and conflicts that implicitly say something about our social contract with each other today arguably play out so emotively in the figure of the child. In Child as Method: Othering, Interiority and Materialism, Burman invites us to consider what markers the material and symbolic figure of the child offers to our societies that are historically and are still governed by logics of race, gender, class, and nationality. Interrogating seductively recalcitrant tropes of the child in disciplinary, popular, and national imaginaries, Child as method brilliantly questions the machinations by which historical practices of difference have been and continue to be produced. It is an insightful and at times sobering analyses of relations to power and technologies of violence and how these are configured through the figure of the child in its multiple facets.’ Peace Kiguwa, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

‘This book is an invaluable resource for critical theorists and scholars offering a detailed conceptual exposition of childhood as a material practice and as a conceptual resource. Burman considers significant and urgent areas of focus at intersections between childhood, the state and transnational geopolitical contexts. This extends and deepens theoretical, analytical and conceptual work offered by Burman previously in an important new publication.’ Professor Lindsay O’Dell, The Open University UK

‘Child as Method: Othering, Interiority and Materialism represents a significant development of Erica Burman’s previous work, Fanon, education, action: Child as Method (2019) where she presented a bounded standpoint that takes as its starting point the extant discourses of the child and childhood. In this evolving feminist exploration, Burman continues her work to deconstruct the dominant structures rooted in heteropatriarchal Eurocentrism, such as developmental psychology on one hand and development discourse on the other. In this book, Erica brings out the subtle yet deeply ingrained ways in which these continue to perpetuate these hegemonic structures. Her work draws upon a variety of resources such as anti-colonial and postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, literature and film, and as always, feminism. It challenges us to question and reevaluate our understanding of not only the child or the man, but society as it is and as it could be. Thus Child as Method continues to provide both a fresh theorization of the domain of childhood studies and hope for an alternate future.’ Sabah Siddiqui, Assistant Professor, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, Krea University, India

‘Erica Burman offers a fresh and critical analysis of child and childhood – and their tropes – in Western societies via themes usually related to their reverse side, such as geopolitics and economics. Burman revisits concepts key to developmental psychology, showing her consistent dialogue with various feminist and anti-racist fields of thought. The careful analysis of the ambivalences that developmentalism assumes in psychoanalysis is particularly innovative, offering a powerful reading key for Child as Method framework.’ Amana Mattos, Professora Associada do Instituto de Psicologia, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

CHILD AS METHOD

In this vital volume, Erica Burman presents a synthesis of her work developed over the past decade. Building from her path-breaking critiques of developmental psychology to the strategy of plural developments, her more recent work elaborates a new approach, generated from postcolonial, feminist intersectionality and migration studies: Child as method. This text amplifies the Child as method’s success as a distinct way of exploring the alignments of current ‘new materialist’ or posthumanist approaches with supposedly ‘older’ materialist analyses, including Marxist theory, feminist theory, anticolonial approaches and psychoanalytic perspectives. It assumes that childhood is a material practice, both undertaken by children themselves and by those who live and work with them, as well as by those who define politics, policies and popular culture about children. Key chapters interrogate historical legacies arising from the Eurocentric origins of what are now globalised models of modern childhood and evaluate the problems posed by the structure of emotion and affectivity that surrounds children and childhood – by tracing its evolution and indicating some of its unhelpful current effects in recentring white/Majority world subjectivities. Child as Method provides key contributions to a range of disciplines and debates including developmental psychology, critical childhood studies, education studies, legal studies, health and social care and literature. Erica Burman is a critical psychologist, educationalist, antidevelopmentalist and feminist postcolonial scholar and activist. Her work spans mental health contexts and training as well as critical childhood studies. She has written extensively on development (in its multiple senses) and contributes to childhood and educational studies by connecting social theory with educational and psychological practices.

CHILD AS METHOD Othering, Interiority and Materialism

Erica Burman

Designed cover image: Photograph by Erica Burman taken in Chorlton Water Park, 2022, with thanks to Philomena Harrison and Suryia Nayak First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Erica Burman The right of Erica Burman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-25573-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-25572-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28403-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031 Typeset in Sabon by by Apex CoVantage, LLC

I dedicate this book to my mother Berenice Burman (1929–2022) olav ha-shalom

CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsxi

Introduction and overview: child as method – othering, interiority and materialism

1

PART I

Culturenatures of childhood: histories, legacies and possibilities29   1 Child, blood, honour

31

  2 Children and/as animals: developmental hierarchies, affinities and solidarities

68

  3 Sentiment: gendered, generational and animal affectivities96 PART II

Interior Design

125

  4 Antidevelopmentalism and/in psychoanalysis

127

  5 Cultural-ideological contexts of new (and old) developmentalisms141

x  Contents

  6 Development and child in psychoanalysis

160

  7 Resisting developmentalisms

188

PART III

Landscaped worlds: materialism, child and the more-than-human

201

  8 Reading Materialisms

203

  9 Perec: children will be running along a white road

216

10 Saramago: with one arm left in Africa

251

11 Materialisms: neither new nor ‘silly’

284

Index300

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If one is a materialist, how best to account for the influences (human and more-than-human) informing this text, which has been brewing and chewing me up for the past decade or so? So many accidental and contingent, as well as planned and deliberative, engagements have shaped the contents of this book. These include apparently chance events and encounters as much as long-standing relationships and commitments. Further, although this may not be especially evident, this is in many ways a more personal book than others I have written. So it is with some trepidation that I launch into the world. There are some formal acknowledgements I  should document, however. While this book is comprised of new text, some of its chapters were prompted and provoked by conference invitations. To be specific, some parts of Chapter  1 were initially drafted as ‘Challenging legacies: rearticulating “honour” and “the child” ’, presented as a keynote at the 11th Annual Conference of (the now defunct) Centre for Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood (CEIEC) ‘Honoring the child, honoring equity 11: inspiring change(s): insights, challenges, hopes and actions’, held at the University of Melbourne in November 2013. Part of Chapter 2 first came into being as ‘Engendering postcolonial child/animal relations’, an invited paper for a conference entitled ‘Dogs, Pigs and Children: Changing Laws in Colonial Britain’, convened by the Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law at SOAS, University of London, in September 2013. A section of Chapter 7 was presented at a conference in 2022 and published as ‘Child as Method as a Resource to Interrogate Crises, Antagonisms and Agencies’, Estudos e Pesquisas em Psicologia doi:10.12957/epp.2022.71744 (online version). Child as Method as a Resource to Interrogate Crises, Antagonisms and Agencies

xii  Acknowledgements

| Burman | Estudos e Pesquisas em Psicologia (uerj.br). I must here express my deep gratitude to the organisers of these conferences, as these events were vital for me in formulating ideas and also in encountering new perspectives, and their influences continue to reverberate now, even if I cannot do full justice to their contributions. While these early formulations have clearly structured some of the content and focus of these chapters, nevertheless the book is composed of entirely rewritten and largely entirely new material, much of it written in the past couple of years. Alongside these formal thank-yous, there are many, many academic-­ activist friends and colleagues whose support has helped inform this book. Not least is a new-ish community of childhood and educational scholars who are engaged with critical psychology and critical approaches to childhood as these engage the wider social practice. I am especially grateful to the (anonymous) reviewers of this manuscript, as well as especially the endorsers whose suggestions – even at a very late stage – have undoubtedly improved the text. The transnational Cold War Childhoods team have also been a key inspiration, especially Zsuzsa Millei, as well as the transnational links and perspectives emerging from the Childism Institute, convened by John Wall and Tanu Biswas, and the Childhood, Law & Policy Network convened by Hedi Viterbo. There are other friendships, connections and solidarities going back decades. I must here thank, among others, for their continuing supportive and critical engagement, Tiago Almeida, Jill Bradbury, Daniela Caselli, Ana-Cristina Dunker, Chris Dunker, Angel Gordo-Lopez, Ilana Katz, Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Amana Mattos, John Morss, Maria Nichterlein, Mike Selzer, Jackie Stacey and Ingrid Palmary. Feminist psychology friends, colleagues and ex-supervisees including Pam Alldred, Hannah Berry, Barbara Biglia, Rose Capdevila, Lindsay O’Dell, Sarah Crafter, Philomena Harrison, China Mills, Ilana Mountian, Mandy Pierlejewski and Sabah Siddiqui have contributed in both evident and perhaps less evident ways. My group analytic and psychoanalytic colleagues have, in the background, been important in helping me stay engaged with wider political issues requiring critical analysis of affect and activism, especially in challenging racisms – so I thank Jane Bloom, Farideh Dizadji, Antony Froggett, Sue Einhorn, Viv Harte, Kathryn Holland, Lara Sheehi, Stephen Sheehi, Reem Shelhi, and especially Suryia Nayak, as well as remembering the vital contributions of Claire Bacha, who sadly died in May 2023. In perhaps less direct but still important ways, I have benefited from significant support from colleagues at the Institute of Education at the University of Manchester, including especially Laura Black, Steve Jones and Julian Williams, while I am so happy to see Chae-Young Kim taking forward the agenda to embed childhood studies within the Institute. I  must especially mention Luan Cassal and Artemis Christinaki who have made Child as method so much more ‘real’ and material, by both organising and convening

Acknowledgements  xiii

a conference at the University of Manchester on this theme in June  2023, and by taking it up in their own work in wonderful ways I could not have imagined, with Laura Goodfellow, Mandy Pierlejewski, and Luting Zhou also engaging with this framework, so indicating that Child as method does important work beyond my own vague ponderings. Ian Parker has, as with its predecessors – and, I  hope, its successors – helped shape and nurture this book, with direct indispensable intellectual as well as organisational, practical and personal support. Finally, thank you – dear reader – for taking the time and making the effort to read this book. It may not all be an easy read, but I hope you find it worthwhile, as an engagement with urgent and visceral questions posed by and with childhood: of othering, interiority and materialism. Erica Burman October 2023

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW Child as method – othering, interiority and materialism

What so powerfully pulls us into the cry ‘Think of the children!’, or the claims that traffickers are stealing children away? Why do so many academics and professionals think they need to know what a child is to do their work? What are the connections between obvious, even banalised, tales of child suffering in charity campaigns as affective modalities to galvanise support and national and transnational policies that root social wellbeing and economic prosperity in models of child development? So, welcome to this book, the outcome of many years of reading and writing, which is inspired by such questions. My hope is that you find this book thought-provoking, provoking too, perhaps; but also enjoyable to read and use. For I see Child as method as a framework to be put to work. It is not an intact, enclosed, finished theory but rather a perspective for asking (what I see as) interesting and important questions about how the figure of the child and claims about childhood both reflect and contribute in potent ways to geopolitics. Such potencies are exercised by the figure or trope of the child and childhood (if not the actual depiction of children); I suggest that their analysis offers a particularly acute route to diagnose axes and dynamics of power, at local and global, national and transnational levels. Indeed, the superfluity of images of children and childhood in one domain can be seen to rely upon or be co-constitutive of abjected or (what Cocks’ 2014, in his analysis of nineteenth-century English literature, called) ‘peripheral’ children. Hence, absent children, or vestigial children, can still secure dominant discourses (as in the ways excluding children – whether from entering a nationstate as an asylum seeker, or from an educational institution – is productive for the other state and systemic parties constellated around that practice). Hence, in this book, I investigate psychopolitical efficacies of both ‘obvious’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-1

2  Introduction and overview

and minor or hidden children in academic, cultural and political discourse. Specifically, I explore the role of the child in relation to modes of othering, models of interiority and debates about materialism. In this chapter, I briefly introduce Child as method as the guiding frame for this volume, as a feminist intersectional decolonial approach that interrogates the relations between political and psychic economies through attending to the figure of the child as a potent effect and agent of geopolitical dynamics and axes. I offer a rationale for why and how I have arrived at it as an important resource supplementing other critical approaches to development that explicitly or implicitly rely on, or make recourse to, children or childhood, including developmental psychology, before outlining what lies in the chapters ahead. A very brief introduction to Child as method

Child as method focuses on both the political and psychic economies mobilised by, and in the name of, children and childhood. Posing its project in this way highlights its three related concerns. First, the role of the child within political economy. Second, how child figures within psychic economies, understanding the psychic as both social and individual, with the notion of economy topicalising its dynamics as well how the latter play out in, and play into, sociopolitical agendas. Third, how child and childhood works as a specific arena by which to interrogate and evaluate practices engaging both psychic and political economy, and the consequences of this. This theme of specificity runs throughout the book, exemplifying calls for geomaterialist analysis, with child functioning here as the specific exemplar from which to tease out an understanding of these dynamics. Hence, the aim is to intervene in arenas in which children figure in two directions: first, to demonstrate how and with what effects wider geopolitical issues are reflected and enacted in childhood and related (psychology, education, psychotherapy) studies and social theory, while correspondingly, second, to demonstrate how and with what effects analyses of and about childhood can contribute to and enrich wider geopolitical concerns. As I discuss extensively elsewhere, Child as method’s conceptual-political inspirations come from cultural, postcolonial and migration studies, especially Asia as method (Chen, 2010), and Border as method (Mezzadra  & Neilson, 2013). Readers who want to know more about those conceptualpolitical underpinnings are invited to read these other accounts (Burman, 2019a, 2019b, 2023a). These are read from and with a feminist commitment to intersectionality and queer theory. The notion of ‘method’ informing these is as an analytical framework to guide inquiry, rather than a set of techniques (Burman, 2017, 2019a, 2022). Specific methodological approaches and methods therefore arise via that engagement, and so I offer comments about these in the context of each inquiry undertaken.

Introduction and overview  3

A significant point, already flagged up earlier, is worth further noting here. The analyses presented here sometimes involve overt, and so naturalised, constructions of child and childhood that demand critical interrogation precisely because of their assumed obvious or banal status. Yet other constructions discussed in this book are implicit or else take close reading to excavate, interpret and evaluate what work they do. Contestable as such interpretations undoubtedly are, they illustrate also what I  believe a Child as method analysis is for: to resist the dynamics of abstraction and apparent depoliticisation usually characterising childhood tropes, instead to pressurise the interplay and mutually constitutive elaboration of models of child and childhood with wider axes of power. Hence, a particular focus of this book is on the multiple articulations of constructions of child and childhood with modes of racialisation and colonialism discernible within the specific texts taken for analysis. Hence, Child as method can be taken, and is being taken, in all kinds of directions. I myself have so far drawn on the approach to explore the colonial imbrications of core, widely accepted psychological models, including cultural-historical approaches (which are often seen as the most ‘radical’ or democratic of these) (Burman, 2019a); to generate readings of the corpus of writings by Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial theorist and psychiatrist, in terms of the various psychoaffective politics of childhood his revolutionary texts invite (Burman, 2019b); combined it with mobile urban autoethnographic approaches for an empirical study of photographical records of the debris of childhood – or what I have called ‘Found childhood’ (Burman, 2022, 2023c); and, together with Zsuzsa Millei and colleagues working on memories of growing up in former communist countries (Millei et al., 2022; Silova et al., 2018), as an analytic tool to explore the political temporalities and narrative tensions within the biographical accounts (Burman & Millei, 2022; Millei et al, 2021). I have also mobilised the approach to inform critical analysis of conceptualisations of children’s rights (Burman, 2022, 2023d), as inflecting cultural practices of memorialisation of political economic traumas (Burman, 2023e), and as a means of interrogating transformations of colonial and neoliberal dynamics in parenting practices (Burman, 2023f). There are many other ways Child as method is being taken up, for example as a tool to evaluate datafication practices in the schooling of children (Pierlejewski, 2020), as a lens to interrogate the politics of gender recognition legislation and policies (Cassal, 2022, forthcoming; Cassal & dos Santos Oliveira, 2023Ref_24_FILE1503266970Intro), as a means of interpreting the ambiguities of understanding of child rights in educational psychologists’ accounts of their practice (Goodfellow, 2023), as well as taking up Chen’s concerns with transcending East–West binaries, and using his strategy of inter-referencing, to generate new understandings of the content and processes of early childhood education in Mainland China, Singapore and

4  Introduction and overview

Hong Kong (Zhou, 2021; Zhou et  al., 2021). It is even being formulated as an activist approach enacted by young asylum seekers arriving in Europe and detained in Greek refugee camps (Christinaki, 2023, in press). In this book, I attempt to put Child as method to work to inform understandings of modes of othering, models of interiority and claims about forms of materialist analysis. To clarify, in its focus on interrogating relations between various actors and entities articulated through discourses of child and childhood, Child as method is both nonchild-centred and non-developmentalist in approach. This prefix ‘non’ topicalises some kind of suspension or interruption qualifying the expected formulations mandating being child-centred and developmental, while characterising the approach as non-developmentalist invites a distinction between these that could allow for being developmental without being developmentalist, a politically fruitful possibility that I return to in the book. Overall, the topicalisation of child is a social category. As is addressed in the substantive sections of this book, notions of child and childhood are often considered in temporal, chronological – including biographical, including autobiographical, and generational – terms. Child as method works to attend to, rather than assume, the meanings and efficacies of these (see also Millei et al., 2022). In this sense, how child and childhood figure in national and transnational policies, in literary and popular culture, in political theory as well as in developmental psychology and psychoanalysis become resources arenas for inquiry, especially insofar as they reflect broader cultural developmentalist themes and, even more so, if they allow for antidevelopmentalist perspectives. For Chen’s (2010) geomaterialist cultural analysis, this means shifting focus from East-West binaries to local, regional dynamics, which may both reflect historical colonial relations but also in particular geographical, historically specific forms of these, which are also forged anew or may even mitigate and change them. Notably, Chen’s text has inspired the field of Inter-Asian Studies as a frame for postcolonial studies that focuses on regional relations. Thus, Child as method, informed by Asia as method, and the conjoint feminist, migration and queer studies focus on borders and bordering practices after Anzaldúa (1987) (e.g. Hall, 2015; Icaza Garza, 2017) orients to and attends how the local reflects but reworks the global. Child as method versus developmental psychology

Having briefly outlined Child as method as an approach, I will now further elaborate its rationale as the latest step in a long-standing political-­intellectual project of challenging developmentalism in its many guises. Some readers will be aware of my previous efforts to challenge the powers of developmentalist discourse enacted through and around child-related

Introduction and overview  5

practices. A  decade ago (in Burman, 2013), I  attempted to explore (what I  called) the desire for development and its role in limiting and distorting models of children and childhood, considering what purposes developmentalism serves. I drew on psychoanalytic ideas in the hope that they might offer indications of ways out of developmentalism’s seductions and securities, to suggest that: a focus on the modes of desire installed around development offers some interesting lines of inquiry, for two reasons. Firstly, this turns the gaze from the object to the subject of desire and so offers some resources for resisting the dynamic of abstraction and fetishisation that typically surrounds childhood to highlight instead the processes that set up and maintain such processes. This would involve shifting the focus from the child to the psychic and material relations of others towards children. Second, this move facilitates interrogation of the conditions for the mode of subjectivity that generates and maintains that desire. Finally . . . the dynamic of development turns its practitioners into its own objects, both as its inverse (or ‘negative’) and as the medium for its realisation. Perhaps, psychoanalytic ideas can help thwart this particular repetition. (71, emphasis added) Various chapters in this book, especially in Part I, take up the first point, identifying the dynamics that produce the abstraction and fetishisation of children and attending to the constitutive material relations generating forms of childhood. However, it is in Part II that the question of the psychic investments driving developmental desires is explored. There, reflecting on the nondevelopmentalist commitments animating a Child as method approach, I take up this tricky question, which also includes addressing what happens when psychoanalysis turns developmentalist and the grounds for a critical, antidevelopmentalist interpretive rug is pulled from under one’s feet (so to speak). Doing this requires a critical engagement with psychoanalysis and consideration of its shifting and vexed relations with developmental psychology. It also brings into focus the shifting relations between being the object and subject of development. Hence, Chapters 4–7 circle around a range of spaces and temporalities that come into play within various models of ‘interior design’. This paves the way for a re-engagement with the ways the ‘external’ reflects and reshapes that ‘interior’, via deeper consideration of models of materialism. What’s wrong with developmentalism?

Having identified Child as method as a non-developmentalist approach, readers may wonder why developmentalism is a problem. After all, isn’t it useful to have some general model of typical development, some kind of blueprint

6  Introduction and overview

or broad-brush picture of how children develop? How else will developmental disorders and delays be identified, and service support and intervention for children, communities and families mobilised? I can respond to these questions in two ways. The first response highlights the problems with wider socioeconomic narratives of international economic development. Lea Ypi’s (2021) memoir of growing up in 1970s Albania, significantly subtitled ‘a child and a country at the end of history’, describes experiencing first-hand not only the collapse of communist rule but also how this instituted a regime of Western-oriented development. She writes: During those years, “the rest of Europe” was more than a campaign slogan. It stood for a specific way of life, one which was imitated more often than understood, and absorbed more than often than justified. Europe was a like a long tunnel with an entrance illuminated by bright lights and flashing signs, and with a dark interior, invisible at first. When the journey started, it didn’t occur to anyone to ask whether the light would fail, and what there was on the other side. It didn’t occur to anyone to bring torches, or to draw maps, or to ask whether anyone ever makes it out of the tunnel, or if there is only one exit or several, and if everybody goes out the same way. Instead, we just marched on and hoped the tunnel would remain bright, assuming we worked hard enough, and waited long enough, just as we used to wait in Socialist queues – without minding the time that passed, without losing hope. (Ypi, 2021, p. 195) The presentation of progress and development as a linear, singular trajectory modelled on Europe is shown to demand of citizen-subjects that they subscribe to and subordinate themselves to a European model, the form and rationale for which is a mystery to them, and its requirements for uniformity and conformity, and even faith and optimism, as arbitrary and incomprehensible as the model it is supposed to replace. Indeed, she questions what, if anything, is on the ‘other side’ of entering Europe; that is, what alternatives are being foreclosed or proscribed? Why should there not be multiple entry points and exits on this journey? Her evocation of the sense of being trapped and that perhaps there is no way out resonate powerfully. As a second illustration of what’s wrong with developmentalism, I offer a biographical account. I do so to help situate my argument, showing where Child as method, as I have been formulating it, comes from (culturally, politically, generationally, and disciplinarily). Teaching and learning antidevelopmentalism

My undergraduate degree was in Developmental Psychology with Cognitive Studies (an unusual combination, then as now, to study a specific branch of

Introduction and overview  7

psychology for a first degree). Later, looking for a teaching job, this degree appeared (to my employers) to qualify me to teach anyone on any training course concerned with any aspect of children and development (and at the time I  wasn’t in a financial position to disabuse them of that illusion). Nothing could be further from the truth, in the sense that my studies had been largely theoretical (although I did manage to conduct an ‘experiment’ with children for my final year project, which confirmed some of the critical debates on Piagetian approaches just emerging – specifically Light et al.’s 1979 study – on how social influences enter into assessment of children’s ‘concrete operational’, ‘conservational’ competence). But just as Piaget was a genetic epistemologist, not a child psychologist, I was most inspired by the philosophical considerations at stake in understanding development (including how it might be being modelled on computers), rather than aspects of their practice – that is, as addressed to specific human individuals, especially young ones. If my (increasingly critical) eye was on disaggregating the possibilities of individual development from regimes of conformity to dominant models of social, political and development, in my first teaching post the courses I was employed to provide sessions for training professionals which were primarily practice-based. This was because, as a psychology lecturer, I was only ‘servicing’ these courses, rather than being able to define the remit of my contributions. My role was to teach the students about norms and patterns of human development. For Health Visitors and Midwives, this was in terms of infant and early child development; for trainee Youth and Community Workers and Social Workers, it was adolescent social and emotional development; for Community Psychiatric Nurses, it was models of abnormal development and the various developmentalist explanations for these; for so-called Community Mental Handicap Nurses (yes, they used that title then), it was to install benchmarks for typical development from which their client group might, or might not, deviate, for already professionally qualified nurses doing a degree it was lifespan development, including ageing. I even worked with teachers doing a part-time MA in Art Education who were expected to be taught about the ages and stages of children’s drawing, alongside theories of play and their links with creativity. In all of these courses, Piaget, Freud and often Erikson were the mandated theoretical frameworks, and very limited, bowdlerised versions at that, comprising ages and stages as specified by core textbooks with titles like Psychology for .  .  . [insert professional group of your choice] (and the content was actually completely standard across the volumes, which differed only in title) produced by the British Psychological Society, as well as by big glossy US child development tomes. It was only in my teaching to psychology undergraduates, both in their first-year introductory lectures and then in more detail in the compulsory ­second-year Developmental Psychology yearlong module, that I was able to offer some nuance and critical reflections on the terms and conceptualisation

8  Introduction and overview

of development, and to invite questions about how and why child development is aligned with human development, so presuming some kind of universal, general trajectory connecting not only all children, and in turn asserting connection between these children and the adults they would become, but also with social and economic development, nationally and even globally). Here, I could (even if it was not what they wanted to hear) pose questions about the unit as well as the ends (both goals and limits, and also consequences) of development and show how societal (gendered, classed, racialised, heterosexed) norms were implicitly if not explicitly inscribed within models of individual development, miniaturised within the child and its (equally miniaturised ‘environment’, usually the parental couple). The combined experience of teaching and learning with all these different kinds of students gave rise to my first book, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (Burman, 2017). Nowadays, perhaps the vista of planetary catastrophe brings these wider questions more easily to the fore. Back then, it was hard work to inspire interest in the more conceptual debate about why the unit of development in psychology in general, and developmental psychology in particular, slips from general to particular (from human, to nation, to economy, to child) and back again (from child to nation, to economy, to human). Influenced as I was by debates in dialectical psychology (after the work of Klaus Riegel, 1975, 1976, 1979), it was the formalism of the theories and how these prompted the conflation of various types and levels of development that troubled me (as also explicitly topicalised in my later book Developments: child, image, nation; Burman, 2020). This concern continues across debates about constructions of early childhood and associated education and care practices, as a matter of distinguishing fact from fabrication, as well as linking understandings of interiority with forms of social control, as other authors have also pointed out: it is a question of whether we should consider the problems of democracy in early childhood education and care as real problems, rather than [as] obeying the current “abstract formalism” (Leslie, 2007) that surrounds early childhood. This abstract formalism is the very logic that ties together a preference for “interiority” (development and learning takes place within each individual) with the desire for control (standards and accountability movements) and the longing for measurable results (economic investment in “early intervention” and the child as “human capital”. (Vandenbroek & Olsson, 2017, p. 88) As a new academic, I  may not have been a good teacher, certainly not at first. But I did learn from my students. Most of all I learnt from the training professionals, the nurses, social workers and teachers. They were ‘mature’ students, that is, people who had already done practitioner training in

Introduction and overview  9

professional settings, and were largely of working-class (and often minoritised) backgrounds. While I was pained by the horrific simplicity of ‘what the baby does, and does next’ of their prescribed textbooks and acutely aware of the how elision of the social, cultural and political actually inscribed the dominant orders within these childhood tropes, it was these students who taught me how to see the intersecting classed, gendered, Eurocentric and racist, disablist and heterosexist effects of these models – on their clients, and on them as workers as well as students. That is, they were turned into both developmentalist objects, and subjects, as well as their clients. They showed me how prevailing models overlooked or naturalised the relational and attuned professional expertise. And together we explored their examples of classed, racialised and gendered oppressions such theory-informed practice could warrant. I have told versions of this story before a few times (including in the Introduction to Deconstructing Developmental Psychology; Burman, 2017), but I want now to reflect upon it and take it a little further. What exactly is it that generates this as an incipiently antidevelopmentalist position or moment (for both the students and me)? Doubtless, this was not least because many of these students were either entering or else returning to higher education on sufferance, at a moment of institutional imperatives in Britain that inflated thresholds of academic credentials for health professionals in particular. These professionals’ resentment at being in the classroom (again) likely focused their critical evaluation of both the content and the form of their educational experience. At the very least, the starting point seemed to be how ‘the dynamic of development turns its practitioners into its own objects’. That is, it was recognition of the alienation that developmentalist accounts structured into their own professional practice, alongside the class and cultural solidarities of their practice and life experience, and of course the fact that they were senior to me in age as well as qualifications, that drove the students to directly question and even reject such theories. The consequent transformation in understanding certainly involved ‘shifting the focus from the child to the psychic and material relations of others towards children’ (as I put it earlier), in the sense of both focusing on and disrupting dominant relations of knowledge production and corresponding practices around children, as well as highlighting the role of childhood in securing those other normative regimes of development. I am not sure we got as far as interrogating ‘the conditions for the mode of subjectivity that generates and maintains that desire’ (Burman, 2013, p. 71), but it certainly became what is sometimes called a ‘teachable moment’, understood (as in Miller & Szymusiak, 2021’s definition) as a moment of ‘shared responsibility between educator and learner, spontaneity, consideration of the learning environment, and expanding teaching into other applications’ (767).

10  Introduction and overview

Much of the literature on ‘teachable moments’ seems to be focused on medical, including medical educational, settings (although see Ohito, 2016; Woods & Jeffrey, 2019) and is premised on very specific events or interactions that produce such turning points. I certainly recall sometimes heated debates, outright rejection of hallowed academic tenets and engaged arguments animating the classroom. Yet, perhaps as well as with the students, my experience was (I believe) more gradual and retrospective, perhaps more in line with Britzman’s (2012) notion of ‘after education’. It may even have been primarily a teachable moment for me, rather than the students! It certainly involved reciprocal ‘pedagogies of discomfort’ (Boler, 1999; Boler & Zembylas, 2003; Zembylas, 2015, 2018); that is, both I  and the students were forced out of our ‘comfort zones’ to encounter new thoughts and ideas. Whether this gave rise to developmental or developmentalist positions is a question to be returned to, but the encounters were certainly developmental in the sense of provoking change. In this book, I mobilise the (admittedly rather clumsy) terms ‘antidevelopmentalism’ and ‘antidevelopmentalist’. This is because, I suggest, there is a need to distinguish between developmental and developmentalist models. The key political problem, I will argue, lies with developmentalist explanations. That is, I suggest that the fact of development can be acknowledged without subscribing to developmentalism. Developmentalism involves some idea of (positive) directionality, with associated connotations of progress, functionality and adaptation. As seen in Part I, it imports hierarchy onto whatever is designated as developmental change, involving the idea that later forms build on and are built from earlier ones to form better ones. (Note the value judgement at play in defining what is ‘better’.) That is, one of the problems is precisely that notion of ‘later’ forms as being, or needing to be, better (although notably in psychoanalysis that is often not the case). This introduces teleology, implying a goal-directed, purposive character to a set of happenings whose succession may be arbitrary or contingent. Instead, this book proposes that it is possible to understand development as occurring, as happening, without necessarily imputing this teleology. It is teleology (and also a reduced, secularised form of eschatology) that imports apparatuses of normativity and regulation of development around the goals of development, including who defines these and how developmental subjects – whether adults or children – are measured against these. Ways to read this book

Having outlined its background and rationale, I  move now to outline the contents of the chapters that follow from this. Just a little guidance from me here. Of course, I’d love you to read all of this book, from beginning to end. However, the three parts can be read

Introduction and overview  11

separately, even as they connect and, I  hope, add up to a fuller analysis. Chapters within the parts are, however, quite closely connected, and follow on from each other, as they also proceed through the book. Nevertheless, I have tried to build in a little overlap so that you can see where and why you might want to read to situate the arguments made within specific chapters better. The rest of this Introduction is devoted to these overviews, in different levels of detail. This includes further elaboration of the claims made for Child as method, since – as already indicated – it is an approach that is put to work, and therefore built anew from that process of working it, rather than an abstract framework that is ‘applied’ to different contexts and problems. Overview of Parts I–III

The rest of this book comprises 11 substantive chapters, structured in three parts, reflecting the subtitle: othering, interiority and materialism, with an orientation to all three terms sustained across the book. The notion of othering has come to be seen as central to interpersonal and institutional practices of dehumanisation and inferiorisation, including especially racialisation and racism, as elaborated by Frantz Fanon across his writings, but especially in Black Skin White Masks (Fanon, 1952/1970). Dehumanised othering has long been associated in Western culture with animality, as a means of marginalising and inferiorising categories of person, including women, indigenous, colonised and Black peoples, disabled and LGBT+ people positioned as alien to or outside dominant modern Western, heteropatriarchal norms. Children, and notions of child and childhood, have played a more ambiguous and ambivalent role, sometimes motivating racialised – as well as often homophobic – violence in the name of protecting children (the focus of Chapter 1), or alternatively acquiring equivalent status (the focus of Chapters 2 and 3). Tracing these distributions and vicissitudes discloses further collusions and tensions whose (dis)continuities may help elaborate analytical and practical interventions. Part I, entitled ‘Culturenatures of childhood: histories, legacies and possibilities’, introduces the neologism ‘culturenatures’ as both connecting with, but also reinterpreting, recent discussions of ‘naturecultures’ (a term coined by Haraway, 2003, but taken up extensively elsewhere, ranging, for example, from primatology (Malone & Ovenden, 2017) to reconfigurations of the humanities (Potter  & Hawkins, 2009) and especially as reconceptualising materialities in social theory (Latimer & Miele, 2013). This frame was taken up across social theory and science studies as a way of re-conceptualising and challenging Eurocentric enlightenment logics. Overall, instead of centring the abstract, masculinised Western(ised) human, attending to the complex and multiple ways humans and non-humans (or, more positively framed,

12  Introduction and overview

more-than-humans) have long been and continue to be entangled with each other reformulates the binary discourses long noted of European modernity (as structured around gender, racialisation, class, sexuality and ability among other axes), which legitimised European domination of the Global South (noting here the many norths and souths within these), as well as and via the domination of nature. Natureculture analyses do for human–nonhuman relations what Chen’s (2010) Asia as method does in cultural theory, warding off the recapitulations of those binaries to attend instead to specific cross and mutual constitutions that sometimes also subvert them. Rendering naturecultures here as culturenatures works to highlight my engagement with the debates about nature and childhood, and the nature of childhood (Taylor, 2013), through cultural texts – some literary and others drawn from everyday popular cultural practices or policy. This intervention, reflecting Child as method’s analytical attention to construction, mediation and modulation within specific material practices, is put forward to ward off what I sometimes discern as too quick shifts away from the domains of what must inevitably also be cultural practices (see also Cocks, 2014). Even as I accept the thrust of recent arguments for the need to attend to mutual constitution of humans and non-(or more-than-) humans via specific analysis of material, embodied relations that extend to micro-organismic, molecular or even cellular levels, in this book the resources I  interrogate to diagnose the geopolitics and political and affective economies of childhood are explicitly cultural artefacts, some iconic while others are seemingly so minor as have passed into everyday life, presumed as ‘second nature’ perhaps. Part I therefore considers dynamics at work in producing the abstraction and fetishisation of children, attending to these constitutive material relations generating forms of childhood through analysis of specific historical and cultural examples. Part II, ‘Interior design’, signals a concern with subjectivity and inner life. This part of the book takes up the question of ‘interiority’ to consider whether our inner lives are in fact designed and – if so – how, when and by whom or what. This reconsideration of the psychic and social, or between interior and exterior, calls for what Fanon (1952/1970) designated a sociogenic (rather than only ontogenetic) account. The stuff of that consumer industry, interior design – the fabrics, furnishings and fashions according to which our houses, lives, and bodies are arranged and clothed – indicate generational, gendered and cultural identities as well as class positioning, aspirations and other social trends. Even as their pleasures may work as a key compensation or distraction from the alienations produced through capitalism, we are encouraged to think that they say something about our uniqueness and express our individuality and selfhood. This part, then, explores the problematic of development, developmentalism and the elaboration of antidevelopmental positions, since the expression ‘interior design’ involves

Introduction and overview  13

no claims about how this interiority came about, but rather attends to its relations and organisation. I consider how child has functioned in claims of the relations between the sociopolitical and the individual, focusing on political ambiguities around the status of psychoanalysis, as either an antidevelopmentalist or, alternatively, a developmentalist resource, and how versions of this, in policy as well as popular culture, have been informed by technologies. The four chapters composing this part address what the psychoanalytic ingredients for this antidevelopmentalist account might be, before juxtaposing this with popular, cultural and policy contexts where child, baby, infant and even conception come to figure as sites for political intervention and redemption, with selective readings of psychoanalysis mobilised to confirm this. By contrast, in the third chapter of this part, claims made for and about child and childhood are shown to be surprisingly elusive in psychoanalysis, with the debates about the relations between research and clinical work with children now largely resolved, if once a hot, topic. The chapter considers how this has given rise to a reconfiguration of the rationale for infant observation which – even though it has surrendered earlier developmentalist claims about infant observation – still maintains this practice through shifting the developmentalist unit of analysis from the child to the training therapist. As a counter to any apparent developmentalist determinisms, the fourth chapter of the part discusses indicative critiques and antidevelopmentalist examples that combine individual with political transition, and transnational transformations of specific cultural childcare practices. Part III, ‘Landscaped worlds: materialism, child and the more-thanhuman’, topicalises materialism, a theme resonating across the book, in its sustained attention to particular, situated examples and how political economic and geopolitical considerations structure forms of interiority and their relations with conceptions of child and childhood. Chapter 8 considers varieties of materialist analysis, and their contested relations are evaluated. Having introduced some of the tensions between ‘new’ and supposedly ‘old’ materialisms, the approach taken here is to draw out how claims to materialism appear within some fictional works that topicalise human relations with things, with matter, attending also to the ways child and childhood function within these. As another culturenature move, this wilfully representational engagement (since I  base my discussion of modes of materialism on readings of literary texts rather than, say, empirical or scientific research) runs counter to the supposed nonrepresentational status claimed by much current new materialist analysis. Yet it is argued that close readings of these texts can enable helpful insights that support more inclusive and less polarised analyses of materialism, alongside also demonstrating the significant and vital role depictions of child and childhood play in these. Notably, it is suggested that doing so informs and extends geopolitical analyses, in relation to colonial and anticolonial practices and human–nonhuman relations.

14  Introduction and overview

More detailed overview: chapter by chapter Chapter 1, Child, blood, honour

This chapter mobilises Child as method to trace origins and variations of the trope of ‘honour’ as associated with the figure of ‘the child’ from medieval Europe to contemporary postcolonial contexts. I take as examples the ‘blood libel’ charges levelled against Jews across Medieval Europe, addressing the significance of these as being constellated around (false) accusations of child murder, and exploring in detail how and why these came about. Anticipating the discussion in Part III on the relations between material and ideological conditions, this is taken as a specific arena by which to consider the interplay of material with sociocultural conditions producing racism. While it was boy children around whom the blood libel charges were forged, current (so-called) ‘honour’ crimes involve the violence and often murder of (usually but not only) young women transgressing familial, cultural and received religious norms. I reflect on the significance of this gendered shift in relation to the morality politics exercised and enacted by claims to child and childhood. Hence, a constant theme is how cultural and political agendas are fulfilled in the name of the child or children to warrant religious and racialised persecution. This analysis connects with the next two chapters in this part of the book that focus on the liminal and so productive status of the child, as both akin to or, alternatively, to be saved from, animality such that, either way, the child figures actively within modalities of racialised othering. At issue, therefore, is how the trope of child works within cultural-historical demarcation practices of human–nonhuman relations that articulate and legitimate forms of racialised exclusion. The analysis works, first, to invite better understandings of wider agendas constellated around ‘the child’ – and so clarify whose ‘honour’ and corresponding interests are at stake. Second, to attend to the gendered and other cultural dynamics that surround children, that intersect with their childhood status and, indeed, demonstrate how that status is always relational and co-constitutive of others, both in relation to adults and between majority and minority cultures, and wider political and economic contexts and conditions. Such conditions are also, crucially, shown to include questions of national identity as well as (majority and minority) cultural reproduction. Antiracist feminist perspectives on questions of culture and honour are necessary for this project, so as to avoid collusion in the exoneration of violence in the name of cultural respect, status or (so-called) honour, but equally not ignore the complexity of the (inter)personal, community, institutional and state-wide power relations through which such evaluations are made. As a reminder that there are alternatives to inferiorised modes of othering, the last section of the chapter discusses speculative fictional resources

Introduction and overview  15

by the Black feminist author, Octavia Butler – a novella (Butler, 2005) and a short story (Butler, 1995) – as a means to envisage alternative frames for engaging with questions of diversity and cross-species relations that, correspondingly, concentrate further the critical focus on the historical examples. Chapter 2: Children and/as animals: developmental hierarchies, affinities and solidarities

This chapter considers sociohistorical and legal consequences of particular mixings and metamorphoses between animals and children, framed around a canonical literary example of child–human transformation from Lewis Carroll’s (1965) Alice in Wonderland. The focus is on how cultural-historical conceptions of animals and children intersect with colonial discourses via their complex relations with familial and gendered dynamics. A key preoccupation – throughout this chapter and this book – concerns contested connections between the positions of women and children as articulated by and articulating colonialism and racism. Women’s and children’s positions have been set against each other, since, as subjugated groups, both have – like colonial subjects – been associated with ‘nature’ – in both its primitivising and romanticising senses. Taking such equations and elisions seriously invites further questions around political affinities and possible solidarities, rather than contests. I discuss in some detail the mutual relations and contestations between animal and child protection organisations, exemplified by the UK bodies, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and the National Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). This Child as method exploration attends to complex interplays between the subordinated or, alternatively, the privileged status of the child and other abjected and oppressed parties, crossing disciplines as well as continents. Animals figure in this account – not only as the origin points in the (not so) great chain of being composing European modernity, with the child as close companion – but also in more complicated ways that inflect and interact with conceptions of social order and disorder – including gendered divisions of labour. Chapter 3: Sentiment: gendered, generational and animal affectivities

The topic of children and animals sits at the confluence of recent feminist and anticolonial debates, as well as informed by so-called new materialist and posthuman approaches (the status of which is evaluated in Part III). One feature shared by these approaches is that they challenge or even undo the Eurocentric, logocentric binary between humans and animals, even as they

16  Introduction and overview

highlight the ambiguous position occupied by the child in this. This chapter revisits the legal accountabilities and discretions accorded animals in European courts (that was touched on in Chapter 2) to frame considerations of child–animal relations in terms of how animals have cohabited with humans and incited relations that parallel if not prefigure those with children. Of course, it matters which kind of animal is being considered, as well as which kind of child (with racialised and gendered projections noted as travelling in both directions). Discussion focuses on recent reformulations in the form of the monkey-related imagery associated with children but also the consumer appetite for monkey dolls, which thereby traverses the in/animate binary in part through the affect with which such artefacts are invested. This brings to the fore emotional ambiguities and ambivalences incited by and in relation to both children and their various kinds of proxies – whether animals or dolls. The analysis is informed by Strathern’s (1992) discussion – rooted in what may seem a rather parochial debate within English anthropology but expanding beyond this. The analytical strategy she identifies in this process topicalises how relations with pets (better-designated companion animals) may have prefigured those with children in early England, which are said to structure a peculiarly English, and peculiarly early version of individualism. This attention to affect, or emotion, combined with what I am calling here ‘sentiment’, understood as a socially structured affective orientation, is interrogated using critical and psychodynamic theories. The shift from sentiment to sentimentality turns out to be significant in the elaboration of gendered and generational, as well as racialised and classed orders. Hence, the chapter moves from a tour of human–animal relations and colonial histories, back to critical psychology, and in particular back to discussions of psychologisation. Beyond disciplinary concerns, methodological considerations come to the fore. To be exemplary, in Strathern’s sense, it is necessary to work these examples, that is, to interpret them closely in order to gain traction on discussions that too easily cross times and places without declaring how and why they are related, and what power relations are enacted or occluded in these movements. As with critiques of multiple modernities as obscuring the dedevelopment of the Global South by the Global North (Bhambra, 2007), it is suggested that what is needed is, instead, the interrogation of specific interrelations to identify and evaluate both mutual implications and antagonisms. As already noted, Part II, ‘Interior Design’, considers further models of affect evaluating both cultural and geopolitical effects of developmentalist discourse, and the turn to psychoanalytic approaches as an antidevelopmentalist resource. Its four chapters take up the question of the psychic investments driving developmentalist desires posed at the end of Part I. To remind the reader, this involves, crucially, attending to the ways psychoanalysis can become recruited into being a developmentalist account, allied with – rather than against – the uses made of modern, that is bourgeois, Western psychology.

Introduction and overview  17

Hence, Chapters 4–7 circle around a range of spaces and temporalities that come into play within various models of ‘interior design’, such that Chapter 4 considers why and how psychoanalytic perspectives have functioned as a critique of developmentalism. Chapter 5 addresses how developmentalism is inscribed within culture, in particular via technology and policy. Chapter 6 explores how, as both reflecting and responding to wider cultural dynamics, psychoanalysis can also replicate developmentalism. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses an example of an alternative, antidevelopmentalist account. Chapter 4: Antidevelopmentalism and/in psychoanalysis

Chapter  4 reviews the conceptual basis on which psychoanalysis has been hailed as a critical, antidevelopmentalist interpretive resource. This critical engagement forms part of a consideration of the shifting and vexed relations between psychoanalytic accounts with (varieties of) developmental psychology. Doing this brings into focus the shifting relations between being the object and subject of development. Reflecting a Child as method frame, the chapter highlights cultural-political stakes in notions of development, including structuring individual subjectivities. Political projects of surveillance, regulation or oppression or, alternatively, liberation, mobilise models of social–individual relations that typically invoke stories of children and childhood (see also Meiners, 2016). Second, the chapter takes further the distinction already identified between developmental and developmentalist accounts, where the latter resort to descriptions of individual and child development as a means of accounting for (problems) within current social arrangements. The question of development therefore remains, crucially, an open one, albeit this presupposes shedding of the trappings of developmentalisms of various kinds. Some contingent, but socio-politically significant, relations between psychology and psychoanalysis are identified, that produce forms of psychoanalytic reasoning that have been taken up as antidevelopmentalist resources. Finally, key antidevelopmentalist elements are outlined. These include the following: unconscious determination, the divided subject, why the project of integrating the self is inadequate, a focus on temporality rather than teleology in order to attend to history as lived out within socio-material contexts, and the importance of narrative – including narrative suspensions and deferrals – in elaborating accounts of personal history and especially of traumatic experience as retrospectively recalled. Together, these add up to a model of development seen as logical, rather than chronological or developmentalist. Having identified these interpretive resources for antidevelopmentalist accounts, the following chapters in Part II address how this impulse is thwarted or fails to be realised for significant reasons.

18  Introduction and overview

Chapter 5: Cultural-ideological contexts of new (and old) developmentalisms

Cultural-ideological pressures incite and fuel the demand for developmentalist accounts. While Chapter  4 discusses the status of psychoanalysis as a resource to evaluate the ‘desire for’ development, Chapter  5 considers cultural-political contexts and associated technological and policy agendas driving desires for developmentalism. The critical features identified there within psychoanalysis are shown to become eclipsed by these cultural and political reformulations. I review indicative examples, evaluating the persuasive power of ‘science’, and in particular neuroscience, and attending to the cultural-political embeddedness of developmentalist discourse and its relationship to new technologies, especially brain and ultra-sonar imaging. Yet there are also useful discussions prompting reinterpretation and resistance to dominant mobilisations. Holding such critiques in mind helps identify key spatio-temporal compressions at play that elide and enact prevailing cultural and political agendas. In this, narrative transpositions of the popular for the technical come to play a significant role. While the domain of the interpersonal and the intrapsychic appears increasingly displaced to the neurological, reaching back ever earlier, the chapter highlights some indications of how these dramatic (and probably untenable) claims are also being subtly displaced and warded off. Thus, Child as method both exemplifies and informs David Harvey’s (1989) analysis of ‘postmodernity’, demonstrating how both child and appeals to child development, alongside its attributed futurities and efficacies, operate as intensifications of the individualisation and the foreclosure of the social in late capitalism. Analyses of the temporal and spatial malleabilities enabling this developmentalist cultural politics indicate how and why poor, minoritised and non-normative communities are pathologised within recent applications of attachment theory, especially via claims to neuroscience informing early intervention programmes and adverse child experiences (ACEs). Transpositions of claims made for research are shown to migrate from popular to political domains, acquiring a spurious solidity and reality characteristic of current post-truth and ‘fake news’ times. The figure of the child is mobilised to warrant multiple biographical compressions, as well as conflations, whose retroactive dynamics reach back ever earlier – from childhood, to infancy, to prenatal, even to conception. It is as if the unborn child can solve all social problems and social ills in an era of maximal social, political and environmental insecurity. Chapter 6: Development and child in psychoanalysis

Chapter 6 explores forms of psychoanalysis that reinstall developmentalism. This problem demands careful scrutiny, so as not to undo critical projects. Here, Child as method prompts attention to tropes and figurations of child

Introduction and overview  19

and childhood (whether present or, significantly, absent) so enabling review of how they appear (or fail to appear) within various psychoanalytical models. The status of infant observation and its complex relationships with infancy research is discussed as a key arena for (re)formulation of developmentalist ideas, through which dominant normative assumptions, especially concerning culture, gender and race, also come to be played out. Even though references to child and childhood and development are surprisingly few within psychoanalytic accounts, the analysis highlights a proliferation of modes of child that are appealed to, including not only biographical and chronological children but also metaphorical and retrospectively constructed children. However, even as some developmentalist claims have come to be modified, developmentalism is identified as remaining present in some psychoanalytic accounts; only now the unit of development has shifted from child to adult, albeit adult as a metaphorical child within psychoanalytic training. As a result, vigilance is needed to ward off implicit modes of developmentalism returning via psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic theories, institutions and training, that – even if this developmentalism now has little to do with chronological children – nevertheless directly mobilises metaphoric and conservative cultural politics of childhood. These reverberate in unhelpful ways with concerns around democracy and equality in psychotherapy training and practice, and the powers of its practitioners to challenge and transform oppressive practices. Child as method therefore invites a critical evaluation of the ethico-politics and configured temporalities in both psychoanalytic explanation and practice. Chapter 7: Resisting developmentalisms

The final chapter of Part II of the book begins by consideration Freud’s (1914/1957) trope, ‘His Majesty the Baby’, as a provocative exploration of adult narcissistic desires and projections onto children and childhood. This is alongside revisiting Chen’s (2010) strategies of decolonisation and de-­imperialisation to explore the psychic investments in imperialist developmentalism, as well as in children as expressions of adult desires. The second half of the chapter reviews some alternative resources that show it is possible to counter developmentalism. The first example discussed, combining biographical with political developmental registers, draws on Ypi’s (2021) account of growing up in Albania under, and then experiencing the shift from, soviet to capitalist orders. As already indicated, this depicts a process of recruitment into the narrative of (European) development evoking not only its incomprehensibility but also the sense of bewilderment, even as this process both exploits and pathologises the habits and modes of compliant subjectivity that characterised the former regime. In this process, it also involves the erasure of specific cultural-political histories and practices.

20  Introduction and overview

On a more positive note, the chapter concludes with a discussion of an indicative example of what antidevelopmental accounts might look like, in the form of Gottlieb and DeLoache’s (2016) collection. In this fictional rendering of childcare advice, as it might be narrated in eight different societies, the relativism instituted by the juxtaposition of radically different claims, practices and beliefs about children and childcare works to counter spurious generalisations and cultural impositions or imperialisms around what is ‘right’ or ‘best’, normal or abnormal, for children and their families. This is, I suggest, antidevelopmentalism in action, resisting abstracting the bearing, birthing of and caring for children from diverse cultural-political settings. The shifting geographical and political contexts, through displacement and migration, are shown to institute changes as a result of minoritised status but also generate new adaptations of cultural-religious and everyday practices. The four chapters comprising the third and final part of the book, ‘Landscaped worlds: materialism, child and the more-than-human’, build on the earlier discussion (in Part II) of how inner lives are constructed, composed and reflected upon, to move from ‘Interior design’ to what might be called exterior design – to return, thus equipped, to discussions of materialism, including human-matter relations. By ‘more-than-human’, I  signal discussions of human–animal and human–technology relations, as well as ecologies of living (and dead) matter that include humans among many others. A Child as method attention to modes and orders of spatialities and temporalities, as they are mobilised and organised around intergenerational relationships, informs a review of the relations between so-called new and older varieties of materialism. Further, it offers ways of reconciling some of the antagonisms between these, to demonstrate alignments and mutualities. Maintaining the wilfully culturenatural focus identified earlier, it does so through close readings of key works by the writers Georges Perec and José Saramago to them take up in this discussion through the lens of Child as method. Chapter 8: Reading materialisms

This chapter first considers how debates on materialism connect with debates on changes in class composition and identifications wrought through transformations in modes of labour from industrial to late capitalism, the latter significantly sometimes termed ‘immaterial labour’ (Lazzarato, 1996). It outlines the rise of new materialist approaches, especially as they have come to influence childhood and educational studies, before considering key limitations indicated especially by feminist and decolonial critics. A rationale is offered for focusing on the mid-twentieth-century French author, Georges Perec and the – more recent work of – Portuguese writer José Saramago. Close analysis of one of each of their fictional texts, it is argued, demonstrates ways of resolving the polarisation between supposedly old and

Introduction and overview  21

new materialisms, alongside highlighting the continuing relevance of their widely acknowledged socialist commitments. This account of the debates about materialisms sets the frame for the substantive re-evaluation presented in Chapter 11 in the light of the analysis presented in Chapters 9 and 10. Similarities and differences in the philosophical, as well as political, orientations of these two authors are considered in relation to their individual biographies and specific sociopolitical contexts. Chapter 9: Perec: children will be running along a white road

Before embarking on a Child as method analysis of Les Choses/Things (1956/1967) by Georges Perec, this chapter first outlines how key features of Perec’s biography are reflected in the style and form of his writing, including how his creative use of rules is widely understood to be related to his personal encounters with loss and displacement. Perec’s marginal history and narrow escape from Nazi genocide are discussed as likely informing anticolonial sentiments in his second book, Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour?/Which moped with chrome-plated bars at the back of the yard? (Perec, 1966), as well as highlighting his (albeit also ironised) left political engagements. These general considerations provide a context for the close reading that follows Les Choses/Things (Perec, 1965/1967), a novella which explores materiality in the form of things as possessions – not only as commodities produced by and in the service of capitalism, but also via the psychic dynamics (of aspiration, desire, emulation) they signify, and the forms of generational and class identities and subjectivities constellated around and enacted through them. The emerging picture puts into question the ‘thingly’ status of the material goods as much as attending to the material fabrication of humans, since the former appear more vital than the flattened subjectivities of the main protagonists, Jérôme and Sylvie. They are young people adrift from familial obligations living an insecure but apparently hedonistic, countercultural life in post-World War II Paris. Childhood appears at the beginning and end of Les Choses/Things as a generational but also socially weighted category, as a core feature of the classed and colonial orders that Jérôme and Sylvie and their cohort are trying to escape or avoid becoming. The Child as method analysis of this text highlights two features. First, how the key moment of reflexive transformation occurs in a postcolonial context (Tunisia) of distance from their metropolitan pleasures and pressures. Second, this not only produces a capitulation to the normative developmental trajectories of provincial bourgeois life of the normative White French citizen that they had been warding off, but its symbolisation shows Jérôme and Sylvie’s submission to these class and gendered generational imperatives as well as enactments of racial privilege built on

22  Introduction and overview

an unreflected-upon colonial past. ‘Children will be running along a white road’, narratively signifies Jérôme and Sylvie’s final subscription to, enlistment within or acquiescence to, that modernist progressivist logic: a logic that positions them as on that road, with the children in front of them, ahead of them, that aligns individual and national development as a specifically racialised generational trajectory. Child functions here as a marker of the classing and racialising of generational order, combining the commodified logic of accumulation with that of reproduction. Chapter 10: Saramago: with one arm left in Africa

If Perec accorded objects of consumption more animacy than his human characters, Saramago’s concern with the nonhuman is more obviously and directly lively. Saramago’s historical materialist commitments and regional affinities are evident in his focus on global or national problems and dilemmas, whose navigations by ordinary people he then traces in their encounters with diverse forms of national, transnational and bureaucratic forms of power. Saramago’s explorations in the short story collection The Lives of Things/ Objecto Quase (1978/2012) indicate a range of agentic positions and relations that challenge, undo and even reverse prevailing orders of use and exploitation. Six, very different, stories explore how forms of power are enacted, and resisted, through matter and the non-human or animal, ranging from the Anobium coleoptera, or wood-eating beetles, whose labour in ‘The chair’ topples the Portuguese dictator, Salazar, to how, in ‘Reflux’, the political economy that surrounds the social organisation of the dead, and the fact that death will, in the end, claim the living, renders futile the King’s efforts to expunge death from his life even as he has further exploited, oppressed and sometimes murdered his subjects in trying to do so. Matter rebels in two of the stories, ‘Embargo’ and ‘Things’ as cautionary tales of human consumption and presumption of possession, while ‘The centaur’ offers a tragic, touching story of exile, flight and persecution, as well as a parable of human beastliness and complex speculations about transcorporeality. The final story, ‘Revenge’ appears to draw on biographical experiences discussed in Saramago’s memoir, As Pequenas Memórias/Small Memories (2007/2011). With the exception of this last story, references to child and childhood are strikingly absent from Things, but the minor references that do occur are shown to signify powerfully within his evocations of what might be at stake in transforming dominant axes of power. The Child as method analysis undertaken over these two chapters suggests two contrasting motifs. Perec’s Things appears to mobilise child tropes as indicators of the alienation structured by racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018), whereby child-related references reflect either colonial disengagement

Introduction and overview  23

(where children appear merely as part of a foreign landscape) or else signify the protagonists’ settling for ‘settling down’ to assume their position within the racialised developmentalist generational order. By contrast, Saramago’s The Lives of Things accords child and children some kind of liminal status between human and non-human, such that their presence occurs at moments of subjective and geopolitical transition and transformation. Each author’s materialist approach seems to explore and expose different relationalities and agencies (or lack of agencies) possible within prevailing geopolitical conditions. The analysis focuses on scant but suggestive child-related references in both texts, which are seen as related to, even articulating, the equally few direct references to colonialism. This is even as, together, these child references seem potent indicators of how ideology works. Like the children in Saramago’s final story, ‘Revenge’, the ‘one arm left in Africa’ noted in passing in ‘The chair’, signals resistance. Figuratively speaking, it is the lack of this ‘arm’ to cushion his fall that confirms his demise, the very arm that metonymically characterises Salazar’s brutal grasp on Portuguese colonial territories. Thus Saramago acknowledges how anticolonial uprisings in those territories were instrumental in ending the Portuguese dictatorship, so reversing dominant centre–periphery relations even as he celebrates the agentic powers of, even the absence of, a limb. Chapter 11: Materialisms: neither new nor ‘silly’

Notwithstanding how key figures inspiring the new materialist turn acknowledge their debt to Marxism and varieties of Marxism, enthusiastic claims for this approach typically presume its innovation rather than evaluate its relations with what it is understood to supersede. Yet the analyses undertaken in Chapters 9 and 10 indicated how both Perec and Saramago offer examples that demonstrate socialist, historical materialist commitments that are relevant and indeed attuned to current new materialist themes. These – I suggest – offer political insights into more-than-human analyses. Re-engaging the debates between ‘new’ and supposedly ‘old’ materialisms in the light of the insights emerging from the analysis of Perec’s and Saramago’s texts, it is suggested that – rather than being competing or successive – ‘old’ and ‘new’ varieties offer complementary insights that usefully inform and amplify each other’s analyses. Topicalising ‘silly’, and even ‘abject’, as well as ‘new’ materialisms, the chapter then moves to discuss Lenin’s pamphlet, significantly originally entitled ‘The Infantile Sickness of ‘Leftism’ in Communism’ (later entitled ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder), written in the midst of the Russian civil war. A Child as method reading here works to revise the disparaging and pathologising notions of ‘disorder’ and ‘infantile’ to reclaim these as resources for political modes of engagement aligned with feminist and

24  Introduction and overview

decolonial activisms. This reading thus highlights materiality and materialism as inevitably cultural-historical and political in construction, even – or perhaps especially – when they are understood as ‘natural’. The practice of Child as method in this book therefore disorders prevailing orderings of child and childhood, diagnoses and discloses further geopolitical efficacies, and – hopefully – invites new possibilities. References Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera. Aunt lute. Bhambra, G. K. (2007). Multiple modernities or global interconnections: Understanding the global post the colonial. Varieties of World-making: Beyond Globalization, 59–73. Bhattacharyya, G. (2018). Rethinking racial capitalism: Questions of reproduction and survival. Rowman & Littlefield. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. Routledge. Boler, M., & Zembylas, M. (2003). Discomforting truths: The emotional terrain of understanding differences. In P. Tryfona (Ed.), Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for social justice (pp. 110–136). Routledge. Britzman, D. P. (2012). After-education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and psychoanalytic histories of learning. SUNY Press. Burman, E. (2013). Desiring development? Psychoanalytic contributions to antidevelopmental psychology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(1), 56–74. Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). Routledge. Burman, E. (2019a). Fanon, education, action: Child as method. Routledge. Burman, E. (2019b). Child as method: Implications for decolonising educational research. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 28(1), 4–26. Burman, E. (2020). Developments: Child, image, nation (2nd ed.). Routledge. Burman, E. (2022). Found childhood as a practice of child as method. Children’s Geographies, 20(3), 271–283. Burman, E. (2023a). Child as method: A device to read the geopolitics of childhood. Teknokultura: Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales, 20(2), 243–250. Burman, E. (2023c). Found objects of/as re-membering through the lens of child as method. In C. Owens, M. O. Loughlin,  & L. Rothschild (Eds.), Precarities of 21st century childhoods, critical explorations of time(s), place(s) and identities (pp. 19–36). Lexington Books. Burman, E. (2023d). Child as method as an intersectional frame for conceptualising the geopolitics of child rights. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 31(3), 568–597. Burman, E. (2023e, April). Sherwood and class war: We were all young. Paper for Children’s Fights: Commonalities and Differences across Time, Space and Place, Washington and Lee University. Burman, E. (2023f, November). The master’s tools? Rearticulating nationalist maternalism in and against global child rights discourse – A child as method analysis. Paper for Nordic Parenting Workshop, Reykjavík. Burman, E., & Millei, Z. (2022). Post-socialist geopolitical uncertainties: Researching memories of childhood with ‘child as method’. Children  & Society, 36(5), 993–1009. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12551

Introduction and overview  25

Butler, O. E. (1995). Bloodchild and other stories. Four walls, eight windows. Seven Stories Press. Butler, O. E. (2005). Fledgling. Langton. Carroll, L. (1965). Alice’s adventures in wonderland. In L. Carroll (Ed.), The works of Lewis Carroll (pp. 19–110). Hamlyn. Cassal, L. (2022). Dangerous subjects and discourses of childhood: ‘Child as Method’ for Analysing Section 28 (1988) and LGBT and Trans Action Plans (2011, 2018). In J. Albrecht, P. Gupta, L. Threadgold,  & L. Wallace (Eds.), En-gender 2021: Interdisciplinary explorations of gender studies (pp. 100–114). University of Heidelberg Press. Cassal, L. (forthcoming). Child as Method and Legal Gender Recognition: Childhood, development, and nation in the reform of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) [PhD thesis, University of Manchester]. Cassal, L. C. B., & dos Santos Oliveira, T. (2023). Violência contra infâncias LGBTI+ na educação: Por narrativas ficcionais para pedagogias Queer. Diversidade e Educação, 11(1), 20–46. Chen, K. H. (2010). Asia as method: Toward deimperialization. Duke University Press. Christinaki, A. (2023, February). Child as method as an approach to interpret and resist age assessment of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Greece. Inequalities, disruptions, human rights, and Child as method symposium, disruptive methods conference, University of Manchester. Christinaki, A. (in press). Age assessment and migration control: ‘Child as method’. Childhood. Cocks, N. (2014). The peripheral child in nineteenth century literature and its criticism. Springer. Fanon, F. (1952/1970). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.) Paladin. Freud, S. (1914/1957). On narcissism: An introduction. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the history of the psycho-analytic movement, papers on metapsychology and other works (pp. 67–102). (Original work published 1914). Hogarth Press. Goodfellow, L. (2023, February). Child rights in special educational needs: A child as method analysis. Inequalities, Disruptions, Human Rights, and Child as Method Symposium, Disruptive Methods Conference, University of Manchester. Gottlieb, A., & DeLoache, J. S. (2016). A world of babies: Imagined childcare guides for eight societies. Cambridge University Press. Hall, K. Q. (2015). New conversations in feminist disability studies: Feminism, philosophy, and borders. Hypatia, 30(1), 1–12. Haraway, D. J. (2003). The companion species manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press. Harvey, D. J. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell. Icaza Garza, R. (2017). Decolonial feminism and global politics: Border thinking and vulnerability as a knowing otherwise. In M. Woons & S. Weier (Eds.), Critical epistemologies of global politics (pp.  26–45). International Relations Publishing. Latimer, J., & Miele, M. (2013). Naturecultures? Science, affect and the non-human. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(7–8), 5–31. Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labor. In P. Virno  & M. Hardy (Eds.), Radical thought in Italy: A  potential politics (pp.  133–147). University of Minnesota Press.

26  Introduction and overview

Lenin, V. I. (1920/2016). “Left-wing” communism: An infantile disorder. Reprinted from V. I. Lenin (1952). Selected works (Foreign Languages Publishing House). Red Star Publications. Light, P., Buckingham, N., & Robbins, A. (1979). The conservation task as an interactional setting. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 49, 304–310. Malone, N., & Ovenden, K. (2017). Natureculture. In A. Fuentes (Ed.) The international encyclopedia of primatology (pp. 1–2). Wiley. Meiners, E. R. (2016). For the children? Protecting innocence in a carceral state. University of Minnesota Press. Mezzadra, S, & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as method. Duke University Press. Millei, Z. (2021). Temporalizing childhood: A  conversation with Erica Burman, Stephanie Olsen, Spyros Spyrou and Hanne Warming. Journal of Childhood Studies, 46(4), 59–73. Millei, Z., Silova, I., & Gannon, S. (2022). Thinking through memories of childhood in (post) socialist spaces: Ordinary lives in extraordinary times. Children’s Geographies, 20(3), 324–337. Miller, B. G., & Szymusiak, J. (2021). Recognizing and seizing the teachable moment. Academic Pediatrics, 21(5), 767–771. Ohito, E. O. (2016). Making the emperor’s new clothes visible in anti-racist teacher education: Enacting a pedagogy of discomfort with white preservice teachers. Equity & Excellence in Education, 49(4), 454–467. Perec, G. (1966). Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour?/Which Moped with Chrome-Child as method as an approach of the Yard? (I. Monk, Trans.). Denoël (in Three by Perec. Godine Press). Perec, G. (1967). Things: A story of the sixties. Grove Press (first published as Les Choses in 1965, Julliard Press). Pierlejewski, M. (2020). The data-doppelganger and the cyborg-self: Theorising the datafication of education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 28(3), 463–475. Potter, E., & Hawkins, G. (2009). Naturecultures: Introduction. Australian Humanities Review, 46(1), 39–41. Riegel, K. F. (1975). Toward a dialectical theory of development. Human Development, 18(1–2), 50–64. Riegel, K. F. (1976). The dialectics of human development. American Psychologist, 31(10), 689–700. Riegel, K. F. (1979). Foundations of dialectical psychology. Academic Press. Saramago, J. (1978/2012). Objecto Quase/The lives of things (G. Pontiero, Trans.). Verso. Saramago, J. (2006/2011). As Pequenas Memórias [Small memories] (M. J. Costa, Trans.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brace. Silova, I., Piattoeva, N., & Millei, Z. (2018). Childhood and schooling in (post)socialist societies: memories of everyday life. Palgrave. Strathern, M. (1992). After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Routledge. Vandenbroek, M., & Olsson, L. M. (2017). Discussion. In M. Vandenbroek, J. De Vos, W. Fias, L. M. Olsson, H. Penn, H. D. Wastell, & S. White (Eds.), Constructions of neuroscience in early childhood education (pp. 82–92). Routledge.

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Woods, P., & Jeffrey, B. (2019). Teachable moments: The art of teaching in primary schools. Routledge. Ypi, L. (2021). Free: A child and a country at the end of history. Penguin. Zembylas, M. (2015). ‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: The tensions of ethical violence in social justice education. Ethics and Education, 10(2), 163–174. Zembylas, M. (2018). Affect, race, and white discomfort in schooling: Decolonial strategies for ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Ethics and Education, 13(1), 86–104. Zhou, L. (2021). A crossnational comparative study of ‘learning through play’ in mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore kindergartens [Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Manchester]. Zhou, L., Burman, E.,  & Miles, S. (2021). A  study of ‘learning through play’ in mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore kindergartens using Asia as method. In N. J. Yelland, L. Peters, N. Fairchild, M. Tesar, & M. S. Pérez (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of global childhoods (pp. 70–83). Sage.

PART I

Culturenatures of childhood Histories, legacies and possibilities

1 CHILD, BLOOD, HONOUR

In this chapter, I mobilise Child as method to trace some origins and variations of the trope of ‘honour’ as associated with the figure of ‘the child’ from medieval Europe to contemporary postcolonial contexts. Notwithstanding this vast sweep across histories and geographies, a constant theme is how cultural and political agendas are fulfilled in the name of the child or children to warrant religious and racialised persecution. This analysis connects with the next two chapters in this part of the book that discuss the liminal and so productive status of the child, both as akin to or, alternatively, to be saved from animality such that, either way, it figures actively within modalities of racialised othering. At issue, therefore, is how the trope of child works within cultural-historical demarcation practices of human–nonhuman relations that articulate legitimate forms of racialised exclusion. I  take as examples the blood libel charges levelled against Jews across Medieval Europe, as well as more recent discussions of honour crimes, that is, the violence and often murder of (usually but not only) young women transgressing familial, cultural and religious norms. This background to – what in the broadest sense – could be termed child protection poses considerable challenges both to educationalists and social care professionals and to advocates for and theorists of children alike. However, engaging with these complexities may give rise to the formulation of positive strategies for practical-political change. To support such thinking, at the end of this chapter, I discuss some speculative fictional resources as means of envisaging alternative frames for engaging with questions of diversity and cross-species relations that concentrate further the critical focus on historical examples.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-3

32  Culturenatures of childhood

The aims here are threefold. First, to understand better the wider agendas constellated around ‘the child’ – and so better identify whose ‘honour’ and corresponding interests are at stake. Second, to attend to the gendered and other cultural dynamics that surround children, that intersect with their childhood status and indeed demonstrate how the latter is always relational and co-constitutive with others, both in relation to adults but also between majority and minority cultures, and wider political and economic contexts and conditions. Such conditions also, crucially, include questions of national identity as well as (majority and minority) cultural reproduction. Third, what emerges is how an antiracist feminist perspective on questions of culture and honour is needed that does not collude in the exoneration of violence in the name of cultural respect, status or (so-called) honour, but equally does not ignore the complexity of the (inter)personal, community, institutional and state-wide power relations through which such evaluations are made. Othering, animalising and the infra-human

The term ‘othering’ may originate from Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic, but its popularisation can be attributed to Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of gendered relations whereby women are designated ‘the second sex’ (Beauvoir, 1971). Building from this, othering has come to be seen as central to interpersonal and institutional practices of dehumanisation and inferiorisation (Brons, 2015), including especially racism, as elaborated by Frantz Fanon across his writings but particularly in Black Skin White Masks (Fanon, 1952/1970). This chapter prefigures this book’s wider themes by exploring how questions of othering, alterity and interiority have been and are played out within specific material contexts. In this sense, it anticipates the analysis in Part III on materialisms, and of critical resources informing analysis of models of subjectivity taken up in Part II, even as it opens up the domain of inquiry by topicalising the relations between child, racialisation, humanity and animality. While much recent social and educational theory has considered the ‘liveliness’ of matter (e.g. Osgood, 2019; Mereweather, 2019; Thomson & Linnell, 2020), much of this work has addressed abstract or small-scale contexts such that wider axes, for example of class and racialisation, have been occluded, so attracting charges of neglecting or overlooking colonialism (cf. Jackson, 2015, but for alternative examples see Nxumalo, 2017; Stacey & Suchman, 2012). In particular, educational and childhood studies have explored adult–child and human–non-human (or more-than-human) relations, responsibilities and response-abilities through discussions of the status of animals, including humans as animals, as well as custodians – and exploiters and consumers – of animals. These are further discussed in Chapters 2–4. But prior to doing this, it is equally urgent to situate such demarcations of human–animal relations within specific cultural-political histories.

Child, blood, honour  33

Hence, in this chapter, I locate the question of animality and dehumanised othering as originating within European Christianity, and as specifically organised around the figure of the Jew as an exemplar of what Pines (2018) calls the infra-human. Pines highlights the unresolved political and theological status of the Jew as structuring and structured by ambivalent access to citizenship and corresponding to the sovereign rule (and protection) accorded Jews in premodern Europe. ‘Creaturely life’, the animality so present in recent environmental discourse has at least some basis in the Christian foundations of European culture. Rather than being initially articulated as a racial or biological difference (although this would come later, with the rise of scientific racism of the nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries), the animality of the Jew was ‘posited as a political and theological difference rather than a racial or biological difference’ (Pines, 2018, p. xxiviii), rooted in the writings of St Paul. Analysing how animals appear in modern Jewish literature from Heine to Kafka and Celan, Pines suggests this offers a key insight into the constitution of European culture: the infrahuman exposes a relation between Judaism and European culture and society that is marked by attentiveness to the dehumanized aspects of Jewish existence. With the infrahuman, the artificiality of the figural construction of Jewish identity is laid bare not in the name of an abstract, universal ideal of humanity – that is, not by something foreign to Christianity itself – but in the name of creaturely life, a notion that emerges from the very foundations of European culture and society. (ibid.) It is this specific figuration of infra-humanity that can help interrogate and inform other, more recent, forms of racialisation. The focus of this chapter is how child and children function within such discourses and practices, whether as guarantor of, warrant for, or even fruitful transgressions of such othering practices. Child as method as an intersectional feminist approach

This chapter exemplifies Child as method, in highlighting how a focus on child (or children) works to enact other agendas (including racist and sexist oppression and xenophobia). Tracing through how this occurs discloses further collusions and tensions whose (dis)continuities may help elaborate analytical and practical interventions. Forging an interplay between intersectional, antiracist feminist, analysis and generational orders is key to this discussion. This Child as method analysis puts an intersectional perspective to work (Cho et al., 2013; Collins & Bilge, 2020), across and between categories (of, e.g., race, culture, gender, and generation) as well as attending to

34  Culturenatures of childhood

how the sociopolitical meanings these have exercised have fluctuated historically, and so demand attention to the political consequences of these reconstructions and their corresponding intersectional realignments. This analysis contributes to both gender and childhood studies, as well as informing strategy around more practical engagements with and for children. The focus later on historicising modes of racialisation and their relationship to changing socio-economic conditions underscores how cultural-political (including religious) identifications and minorised community processes (perhaps especially including the modes of political ‘representation’ they have been allowed and taken up in relation to majority, state institutions) have to be seen relationally; that is, as constituted in relation to state and transnational structures of privilege and domination. Hence in this chapter, in contrast to the more recent use of the terms Majority/Minority to refer to Global South and North, respectively (that draw attention to their grossly unequal relations), I  mobilise the terminology of minoritisation/majoritisation to bring a similar attention to more local, within-state contexts, thereby to emphasise the contingent and co-constitutive character of minority community processes and practices. These should, then, be seen as dynamics rather than reified properties, attributes or ‘culture’ (and this is where notions of ‘cultural competence’ or ‘sensitivity’ always risk abstracting and reifying cultural practices, Pon, 2009; Rober & De Haene, 2014; Cockersell, 2019). On this point, Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (2012) discussion of the ‘invention’ of tradition has been helpful, as well as antiracist, transnational and postcolonial feminist debates. In particular, my thinking and activism have especially benefitted from the key discussions and debates formulated by a short-lived, but influential British feminist group formed in the 1980s, Women Against Fundamentalism (see Dhaliwal & Yuval-Davis, 2014). This group of activists and academics, drawn from a range of cultural-religious backgrounds, formulated a feminist antiracist analysis that warded off the then silencing of feminist critique of oppressive patriarchal cultural-religious practices (that crucially also include so-called honour crimes) for fear of either being racist or fuelling racism. Instead, they showed how this critique was actually central to combatting racism, in its misogynist and homophobic forms. This was what would now be called a feminist intersectionality approach, although the term had not yet been coined (by Crenshaw, in her key 1990 article), though it should be noted that other terms used at that time by key authors, such as transversality (Yuval-Davis, 1999, 2006) or translocational belonging (Anthias, 2020) remain current too. This context of, and for, feminist antiracist activism, I  hope, helps to address the justified criticisms of how intersectionality theory has been appropriated, ‘whitened’ and derailed from its origins in Black feminist activism (Bilge, 2014, 2020), as well as demonstrating the importance of attending

Child, blood, honour  35

to the generation and articulation of the axes of race, gender and generation as geomaterialist questions. In so doing, I also seek to challenge versions of intersectionality that turn it into questions of experience and identity rather than highlight how these are produced by structural positionings in need of analysis and transformation. This problem is especially evident in the ways this framework has been taken up in psychology (Grzanka, 2017, 2020). Moreover, in this chapter (as also in this book and elsewhere) I put to work here a particular alignment between Child as method and intersectionality in identifying how and when the child functions as a tool and axis of privilege that intensifies or even produces other oppressions (see, e.g. Moradi, 2017). In terms of the subject matter of this chapter, which does not make for pleasant reading (trigger alert here, for those who need such warnings!), I  should declare that it is inscribed in my cultural-political identifications and academic activist biography. Not only is my focus determined by my geographical location from and in the UK, but also by other cultural-political histories and positionings, as a (cisgendered) woman of Ashkenazi (i.e. Eastern European) Jewish heritage whose grandfathers migrated to the UK at the beginning of the twentieth century escaping pogroms and seeking a better life (as migrants do). Notwithstanding the vicissitudes of Britain’s relationship with (so-called) Continental Europe (and my life spans the UK both joining the EU and leaving it), as other chapters in this book also topicalise, Britain partakes of many of the same cultural-political dynamics of racialisation, xenophobia, heteropatriarchy and the like that are both overdetermined by, but also given particular shape by, specific forms of colonial exploitation enacted via a racial capitalism that, far from abating appears to be intensifying (Bhattacharyya, 2018). For example, recent years have seen an explicit government policy aimed (as its title suggests) to promote a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants, especially non-European migrants, even as global events of war and both political and environmental insecurity have produced massive movement and displacement of peoples. In addition to its personal relevance, the relevance of this subject matter of this chapter since first drafting it seems, unfortunately, to have increased with time. The movement of the political ‘centre’ globally has continued to shift dramatically to the right, with the rise of populist governments within Europe, as well as beyond (in South America, Africa and Asia) alongside the rise and demise of Trump in the US. Far-right, fascist motifs are now not far from mainstream government discourse in Germany, Hungary and Poland, for example, as well as in India and, until recently, Brazil (to take two notable examples), even as the US rolls back its abortion provision and the UK appears to be following suit. The supposed ‘failure’ of the pro-democracy movements across the Arab world from 2011 onwards and beyond has since been occluded by the war against Islamic State and neo-imperialist agendas this was used to fulfil. The Syrian uprising against Assad, which gave rise to

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one of the greatest displacements of peoples in history, as well as massive casualties, is only one among other instances of the instability and interweaving of nationalist and transnational interests (the current wars in Yemen and Ukraine being other highly indicative examples). The Cold War has returned, restyled now as an overt conflict between Euro-US, Russian and Chinese capitalist power blocs over markets and control of populations. These major macro-political concerns may seem far away from questions about the status of children. Yet every generation, nation and political formation has mobilised and characterised children and childhood to reflect its time and pursue its agendas – as the Cold War Childhood project indicated (https://coldwarchildhoods.org/) (Aydarova et  al., 2016; Burman  & Millei, 2022; Silova et  al., 2017). Taking up Chen’s (2010) agenda (outlined in his book Asia as method) to decolonise, de-imperialise and de-cold war (see Burman, 2019a, 2019b, 2022), it is important to interrogate the mutual implications (whether of intensification or challenge) between the various intersectionalities of cultural, gendered, classed, racialised and generational positionings. Border disputes, over categories as well as territories and populations, remain the order of the day (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). For those of us privileged enough to live in relatively secure personal and social circumstances, such interrogations are surely a question of responsibility in the service of solidarity and transformation of current inequalities. On ‘honour’ and ‘equity’

Activists and academics concerned with questions of culture and childhood have sometimes made claims about ‘honour’ and respect – in relation to both individuals and communities. (Think of the ways – notwithstanding their usefulness – discourses of cultural competence and even cultural humility inscribing health and social care training drift in this direction, e.g. Molloy, 2020.) I must admit unease at the notion of ‘honouring the child’ (which was the title of an Australian conference prompting part of the first version of this chapter) even alongside the considerable tensions, challenges or puzzles set in train by juxtaposing this with ‘honouring equity’ (the second part of the conference title). Equity, in its standard dictionary definition, is ‘the spirit of justice which enables us to interpret laws rightly’ (MacDonald, 1978, p. 443). Although there are other senses of the word I will consider later, equity is typically understood in terms of claiming entitlement, of setting abstract forms of equality alongside those of specific positionings that moderate and inflect its premises and practices. That is, it takes elaboration of one’s conceptual framework to arrive at an understanding – still less a practice – of ‘equity’. It also takes consultative and evaluative work, alongside analysis and commitment. This practical-political work is not often done in relation to ‘the

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child’, whose ‘honourable’ status is often presumed – or else those children who depart from its prototypical forms are somehow curiously no longer designated children. So, most of this chapter is about the ‘other side’ of honour; how claims to ‘honour’ can also do work that – in terms of concerns with ethics, equality and equity – could be said to dishonour the doer and the name of whatever wider causes such work is supposedly done. Let’s begin by taking a quick look at definitions of honour: Honour, in U.S. honor, on’ar, n: the esteem due or paid to worth; respect; high estimation; veneration; that which rightfully attracts esteem; that which confers distinction or does credit; self-respecting integrity; a fine or scrupulous sense of what is due; chastity; virginity; distinction; exalted rank; any mark of esteem; privilege; a title of decoration; a title of respect in addressing or referring to judges, etc (in Ireland quite generally); a prize or distinction; (in pl.) privileges of rank or birth; an ornament or decoration. (poet). . . . (MacDonald, 1978, p. 626) At the very least, what can be learnt from this is that appeals to ‘honour’ are politically ambiguous; that honour, respect and privilege are closely related; and that ‘esteem’ and ‘worth’ are relational concepts that presume cultural codes of ethics and morality. (This was something that Piaget (1932) understood in his analysis of children’s moral understandings, tracing this from what he called unilateral to heteronomous respect.) Hence, the one who is honoured is empowered to acknowledge this and so can confirm the honour of those who honour them; or else, if they refuse this then they are vulnerable to charges of dishonour, of dishonouring others by rejecting the value of their honouring. This is part of the process of recognition central to the process of social being (Fraser  & Honneth, 2003). So the stakes are high; honour talk leads easily to its obverse, dishonour. Moreover, we can also see that – following the well-worn tracks of the ways language is ‘man-made’ (Spender, 1985) – how, under conditions of the patriarchal control and regulation of women, honour drifts into specifically gendered sexual understandings (around virginity and chastity). From the history of rape in war (Bourke, 2007) to reports, for example, from the Libyan revolution of 2011 of Gaddafi distributing Viagra to his soldiers to better enable them to rape Libyan women and girls, it is clear that sexual violation or ‘dishonour’ is a key mode of, and metaphor for, the subjugation of groups, communities, peoples and nations. It is precisely premised upon the equation of control of women with that of children, in turn aligned with (cultural as well as biological) reproduction, and with the survival or annihilation of identity, and explicitly linking individual with cultural-political identifications.

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Honour and child concern: a history of the present

Avery Gordon (2008) offers some provocative comments on what writing a ‘history of the present’ involves: As an ethnographic project, to write the history of the present requires a grappling with the form ideological interpellation takes – “we have already understood” – and with the difficulty of imagining beyond the limits of what is already understandable. To imagine beyond the limits of what is already understandable is our best hope for retaining what ideology critique traditionally offers while transforming its limitations into what, in an older Marxist language, was called utopian possibility. (195, emphasis in original) Any online search pairing the terms ‘honour’ and ‘child’ gives rise to thousands of hits on campaigns and debates about ‘honour crimes’, and the attacks and frequent murders of – usually – young women who have seemingly violated cultural codes of propriety. There are many points to note here – not least of course that, as feminists have pointed out, there is no ‘honour’ in killing, while – it should not be necessary to point out – no ­religious ­teaching calls for such actions. As many feminists have also pointed out (Yuval-Davis & Anthias, 1989; Yuval-Davis, 1998; Ueno, 2004), the preoccupation with women’s sexuality and activity as an index of cultural or religious identification reflects a patriarchal paradigm. It positions women and children as property, with women carrying the burden of cultural as well as biological reproduction (as moral guardians of children) and children carrying the burden of the futurity of the community or nation. As Anne McClintock (1995) noted, this heteropatriarchal dynamic was central to the naturalisation of colonial rule. That the position of futurity accorded children also presumes and installs a hegemonic heterosexuality has been widely criticised by queer theorists such as Edelman (2004). Other queer theorists have been quick to claim the child as itself queer in the manifold ways particular embodied children actually transgress presumptions (Stockton, 2009; Bruhm & Hurley, 2004), even as racial neoliberal capital exploits gendered and racialised children further (Gill-Peterson, 2015). Within the political context of Islamophobia, which it seems is escalating since 9/11 alongside the rise of local nationalisms, it should be redundant but perhaps still has to be stated that – while usually associated with Muslims – ‘honour crimes’ are certainly not specific to predominantly Muslim countries or communities, nor even to communities from Asian and African contexts, but have a long tradition within Christendom too. As researchers on ‘forced marriage’ have proposed, if we extend the definition of this practice from ‘forced’ to ‘pressurised’ marriage, then it is possible to see beyond

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the blinkers imposed by hegemonic Global North discourses of ‘religion’ and even ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, to address class and economic considerations as they shape, interact with and intersect with discourses and practices of gender and sexuality (Chantler et al., 2009; Gill & Sundari, 2011; Gangoli et al., 2011). In terms of the various trajectories of my own work that led me here, two strands in particular stand out. This first is as a critic of the multiple ways children have been made to stand for, or symbolise, matters other than themselves – whether goodness, innocence, authenticity, spontaneity, the (past, lost, or even ideal) self, or – indeed – honour. From challenging the spurious naturalisations and generalisations of purportedly universal developmental psychological models, and the injustices they effect, through what their abstractions either overlook and so devalue or, more explicitly, what they problematise and so stigmatise, I have become resolutely suspicious of any claims about ‘what children are like’. That is not to say I am suspicious of the children, but of the claims – usually claims made about, rather than by, children: the content of such claims, their form, and the powers they maintain and, further, perform (though children are sometimes also adept at recognising and mobilising such claims too). The ‘figure’ of the child (Castañeda, 2002) typically works to stand in for, and so often infantilises, or renders subject to the list of qualities associated with being ‘child-like’, whole communities, peoples, even nations – as in aid campaigns (Hutnyk, 2004), or war reporting (Wells, 2007). In so doing, it plays a central role in sustaining imperialist discourse – of intervening and knowing what is ‘best’ for others. The benevolent desire to ‘help’ is politically ambivalent. Child therapists, child rights advocates and educators alike know what damage such presumptions do for children, and similar considerations apply at the level of international development – in terms of both human and economic policies (Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Burman, 2020). There is a specific cultural-political history that has given rise to why and how the child came to ‘personify’ (as Steedman, 1995, put it) subjectivity in the Western world, a history that has its immediate roots in early European modernity. But the moral-rhetorical force wielded by ‘the child’ has come to function (as Baird, 2008, commented on the Australian context) as another kind of ‘fundamentalism’. Honouring the child can be a way of maintaining an exclusionary honour of, and for, the nation. On women and children

Feminists and childhood activists have not always seen eye to eye, for significant reasons (Thorne, 1987; Riley, 1987; Burman & Stacey, 2010). This is not least because of the ways women’s interests have been equated with children’s, including how women have been rendered as children in terms of

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status and power, and especially how the – at least rhetorical – inviolability of children’s needs has worked to regulate women as mothers, and perhaps also as childcare workers, pathologising especially working class, indigenous and minoritised women whose mothering/caring practices do not ‘fit’ the models and theories championed by professionals and policymakers (Walkerdine & Lucey, 1989; Burman, 2008, 2017). This brings me to a second strand of work, which came about through forms of involvement in feminist antiracist activism supporting women, especially minoritised women, in the UK experiencing domestic violence. This work only indirectly concerned children, albeit that children were involved in many ways as affected by the domestic abuse and often accompanied their mothers in taking refuge, rather than as direct participants in the research. Even to say this belies the absolute separation of women and children as political constituencies. This is not only because children figure prominently in women’s decisions to stay or leave violent intimate relationships; nor even because the fear of children being removed from their care by social workers frequently prevents women from disclosing such violence (Burman  & Chantler, 2005; Burman et al., 2004; Chantler et al., 2003). Rather, conditions and campaigns for and about women and children also cannot be absolutely distinguished because (in most cases) half of all children, cisgendered as girls, will grow up to be women. Here, we encounter another major issue concerning actual and semiotic links between women and children: the pressure to give birth to, and corresponding preference for, boy babies, which has long skewed gender ratios in at least half the world, as well as a host of additional issues of care and value affecting girls’ survival and situation (Arditti et al., 1989; Jah et al., 2011; Michael et al., 2013). This second strand of work closely connects with the theme of honour. It turned out that my academic credentials, including my psychological and other research ‘expertise’, were rather less important than various community connections and also having trained as a mental health practitioner. In particular, at the level of researcher relationships what was especially important was a dawning realisation amongst all the community groups we encountered, at the level of personal experience as well as analysis, of how the regulation of girls’ and women’s conduct and especially sexuality is common to all major world religions and is intensified in conditions of racialised marginalisation where there are additional pressures against exposing minoritised communities to further stigmatisation (or ‘dishonour’) via the (disclosure of) abuse (Burman, 2016). Such insights highlight the need to be sensitive to how protection of community as well as personal ‘reputation’, including mothers’ efforts to safeguard the reputation and access to cultural belonging of their children both currently and for their future (e.g. marriage prospects), also figures as a significant additional barrier discouraging the disclosure of abuse (Burman et al., 2004).

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Thus, my trajectory into researching initiatives combatting violence against women came about through the connections we, as a team, found together between mental health issues (attempted suicide and self-harm) and interpersonal issues (domestic and familial abuse) (Burman et al., 2002). Our feminist analysis helped not only to challenge the ways interpersonal violence in ‘the home’ is seen as a private issue (so not, it would seem, meriting state intervention) but also to resist the ways violence was psychologised (as ‘her’ problem) and, in the case of Black and minoritised women, ‘culturalised’ (as ‘their’ problem) (Burman et al., 2004). More significantly, this work helped to highlight how even service providers who could acknowledge the role of systemic issues (such as poverty or racism) nevertheless often failed to grapple with key state-level instigators of the abuse, in the form of precariousness of immigration status, that worked to keep women trapped in abusive relationships. Yet research (our own included) documented how insecure immigration status could be used as a tactic of manipulation and violence as when women were told by their partners ‘if you try to leave me, I will report you and you will be deported’ (Chantler et al., 2003). Thus, violence, like honour, is many-layered and intersectional – simultaneously material and symbolic, public and private, and in significant ways defined and conjugated by the state as well as its subsidiary apparatuses (such as the police, social workers or other medical, psychological, educational or social support workers). For all the talk of ‘rescuing brown women from brown men’ (as Spivak, 1993, p.  297, quipped so presciently, even before such tropes were mobilised to warrant the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq), transnational discourses of ‘security’ have articulated those of gender and violence (see also Shepherd, 2012). The concern for women, as with children, often emerges as mere political window-dressing for other, more insidious, agendas. Debates about forced marriage are a children’s and women’s issue if ever there was one, and they connect closely with questions of honour. But in the UK, this issue remains largely configured within an immigration control agenda – aligned with legal and policy initiatives raising the age of recognition of marriage for immigration purposes on the misconceived assumption or pretext that this may deter what is called forced marriage (Burman  & Chantler, 2009a, 2009b; Chantler et al., 2009). Formulating the questions

So, this brings us to the ways ‘the child’ fits with other social categories and axes of oppression, that is, to how childhood ‘intersects’ with other social positionings. While the discourse of intersectionality has been enormously fruitful as a mode of expressing forms of mutual constitution across structural and experientially significant dimensions of the social (see, e.g. Phoenix & Pattynama, 2006), its methodological and empirical applications

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remain a matter for debate (Nash, 2008; Erel et  al., 2011). I  understand intersectionality, as well as Child as method, as an analytical framework to pose and pressurise key questions and to open up previously presumed and sedimented relations; that is, as a theoretical resource to be put to work, to make it work and this is what I will try to do here. So, practices of honouring the child, and now I add the woman, have not always sat well with equity. So far, I have indicated how I got here. But now, equipped with some interdisciplinary analysis and methodological tools, I want to look further back and ask some rather different questions. First, as discussed so far, current ideological formulations connect honour with women, especially girls. Yet if the connection between child and honour is gendered, in the direction of femininity, has this always been so? And if not, what might this mean? Second, does the trope of honour relate to children in other ways? This is where consideration of the child as an icon, personification, figure – of innocence, or identity of something precious to be protected – becomes necessary; to see how this is also mobile and malleable according to political agendas. While I acknowledge that the above questions are a long way from addressing practical responses to the ways specific children, girls, boys – and women and non-binary identifying people too – are instrumentalised, regulated and subordinated by these discourses of honour, a first step on this road is to identify how and when these chains of symbolic associations between the notional child (or women) and understandings of tradition, nation, civilisation, development and so on) work, and what work they do. To do this I turn to Medieval Europe, to a time when England was ruled by a collection of feudal authorities and newly occupied by the Normans; indeed to a time when – if any note it to be taken of the volumes of literature on the history of childhood (notwithstanding their debates and contests; Ariès, 1962; Pollack, 1983) – it cannot be presumed that children carried the meanings, and indeed lived lives, recognisable as children’s lives today. Yet, as will be seen, children certainly did figure in significant ways within discourses of familial, cultural-religious and national honour. Medieval tales of blood and honour

So now for some tales from a colonial centre. These are cautionary tales, whose relevance is a matter for us to consider, rather than presume. Early 12th-century England saw a rash of child murder accusations that came to be known as the origins of the blood libel, a motif that has structured antisemitic discourse ever since. The motif of blood is perhaps one of the most powerful, if also puzzling, features of this story, although (as will also be discussed later) a preoccupation with blood and blood-sucking as in Vampire myths are also a long-standing, if later, feature of European history.

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Blood was, of course, closely connected with alchemy and sacrifice in Medieval Christendom and before. The connection with Jews is at first particularly counterintuitive and repugnant since, for Jews, blood is sacred and – contrary to the claims of the blood libel – cannot be consumed in any form. (Indeed, blood sacrifices were always proscribed within Judaism from the outset, even when they remained a major feature of other contemporary religions.) Yet there is a particular liturgical place accorded these stories – at Easter, which also coincides with the Jewish festival of Passover. The reference to blood arises from the account of the Exodus and the angel of death’s passing over the houses of Jewish families in Egypt, identified by a mark made in lamb’s blood on the doorposts. Perhaps it is the proximity of these two festivals which, after all, have a necessary historical relationship to each other (the Last Supper being the Pesach Seder), that is being repudiated. Some other accounts suggest that the motif of blood and ritual murder also has its origins in the stories of Jewish parents killing their own children rather than their being massacred by Christians, an account that certainly surrounds the massacre of the Jews at Clifford Tower in York in 1190. The timeline of the blood libel in England begins in 1144 (with William of Norwich), with at least another five cases up to 1255, a date which saw the particularly well-known case of Hugh of Lincoln (often qualified as ‘little’ or ‘Sir’ and then a ‘Saint’, although ‘little saint Hugh’ of York should not be confused with another ‘Saint Hugh of York’). The timeline of child crucifixion accusations (drawn from Bennett, 2005, p. 133) looks like this: 1144 1168 1181 1192 1232 1244 1255

William of Norwich Harold of Gloucester Bury St Edmonds (child unnamed) Bristol (child unnamed) Winchester (child unnamed) London (child unnamed) Hugh of Lincoln

Alongside this, it is worth highlighting that 1290 marks the date of the (first) expulsion of Jews from England. Moreover, these child murder cases were only a subset of murder accusations directed towards Jews. This period coincided with a worsening of Christian–Jewish relations in England culminating in 1290 with the expulsion of Jews from the territories then comprising the British Isles. In fact, this expulsion occurred later than in France, since Louis IX had expelled Jews in 1253. Although, significantly, features of the first blood libel claim (concerning William of Norwich) differ from the canonical narrative which was to follow, nevertheless it is regarded as ‘leading to

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the establishment in Europe of the sort of continuing folklore that makes the blood libel a “legend” rather than a series of related rumours’ (Bennett, 2005, p. 119). The libel ‘legend’ continued and travelled throughout Europe. Bennett (2005) focuses on the Norwich 1144 case – in which the Sheriff of Norwich supposedly gave protection to the Jewish community in his own fortress. Space does not permit a review of theories of antisemitism, nor of how antisemitism and other forms of racist oppression are linked and also differ, while discussions of the historical relationships between antisemitism and misogyny (Gilman, 1993; Harrowitz, 1994; Britzman, 1997) are clearly relevant. At least, though, what should be noted is that there are good reasons to attend to the forms and trajectories of antisemitic discourse as shaping subsequent forms of racialisation and racism. This appears relevant in relation to state-level matters, such as immigration control, since in the UK the first immigration laws were specifically passed against the entry of Jews (Cohen, 1987, 1988, 2006). Nevertheless, in addition to Pines’ (2018) analysis of the alignment of Jews with the infrahuman discussed earlier, it is worth noting Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1979) diagnosis of antisemitism, which was first published in 1944 and so in close temporal and geographical proximity to the Nazi genocide. Not surprisingly, given their critique of the limits of liberal enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis addresses the ways Jews, by virtue of the precarious social and economic positions and occupations they were forced to undertake, became the recipients of the hatred generated by capitalist exploitation: No matter how many great achievements the Jews were responsible for, they could not be absorbed into the European nations; they were not allowed to put down roots and so they were dismissed as rootless. At best the Jews were protected and dependent on emperors, princes or the absolute state. But the rulers themselves all had an economic advantage over the remainder of the population. To the extent that they could use the Jews as intermediaries, they protected them against the masses who had to pay the price of progress. The Jews were the colonizers for ­progress. . . . They carried the capitalist ways of life in various countries and drew upon themselves the hatred of all who had to suffer under capitalism. (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979, p. 175) This enforced connection of Jews with capital and capitalism remains relevant to antisemitic discourse today, even as its contrary (connecting Jews with communism) also functions powerfully – so highlighting a fundamental feature of racist discourse: that it is not rational and so not amenable to acknowledging contradiction (Burman, 2018).

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The only reference Adorno and Horkheimer make in this essay to the blood libel is to propose it as a projection of the violent desires of the antisemite: The Jews as a whole are accused of participating in forbidden magic and bloody ritual. Disguised as accusation, the subconscious desires of the aboriginal inhabitants to return to the mimetic practice of sacrifice finds conscious fulfilment. When all the horror of prehistory which has been overlaid with civilization is rehabilitated as rational interest by projection onto the Jews, there is no restriction. The horror can be carried out in practice, and its practical implementation goes beyond the evil content of the projection. The fantasies of Jewish crimes, infanticide and sadistic excess, poisoning of the nation, and international conspiracy, accurately define the antisemitic dream, but remain far behind its actualization. (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979, p. 186) Norman rule – tax, religion and antisemitism as racialised resistance to occupation

Accounts highlight a whole host of ‘explanations’, ranging from the ­political-economic to the local–national, to insider–outsider, and including specifically religious ‘reasons’, to account for ‘blood libel’ accusations. Approaches include, first, folkloric work tracing how a story becomes a legend and then how that legend, in its retelling by particular authorities, becomes history (Bennett, 2005). In particular, the medieval English monk and ‘chronicler’ Matthew Paris (1200–1259) is credited with generating the apparently authoritative accounts of various of these stories of ritual murder and blood libel, although his own role in embellishing and fuelling such claims alongside documenting contemporary accounts is now well established (Bennett, 2005; Utz, 1999). In this line, Stacey (1988) comments: Although any number of earlier chroniclers accuse the Jews of secret crimes, Matthew is the first regularly to employ such allegations as ostensible explanations for actual royal measures taken against them. It is the justificatory purpose of Matthew’s fictional constructions which makes them so particularly striking and potentially so dangerous, and which sets them apart from any previous English chronicler’s accounts. (150) A second strand of research portrays the blood libels as an expression of antiJewish feelings emerging during the period of the Second Crusade, including as a means for the church to generate status and income. Utz (1999) argues that English churches (unlike in other countries) lacked sacred relics that would attract visitors and income. Ecclesiastical claims to children as martyrs

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would then involve burying them inside the building and so making churches a site of pilgrimage to generate importance and wealth for the church. He notes: The myth of ritual murder originated along with the unsuccessful second crusade (1147–48) and had its general historical causes in the competition between the two monotheistic religions in late antiquity. That English cities became the central sites for the accusation in the twelfth and thirteen centuries . . . had its reasons in the country’s deficiency in saints’ relics which the clergy attempted to compensate by claiming numerous children as martyrs. (Utz, 1999, pp. 28–29) A more specific, political rather than economic, version of this ‘explanation’ concerns its role in the church’s attempts to challenge crown authority. This is because Jewish presence in early medieval Britain arose from being brought by William the Conqueror to ‘bankroll his extensive building projects’ (Bennett, 2005, p. 125). Jews were essential as financiers in medieval Europe because only they could lend money (moneylending being a restricted and highly stigmatised activity). In terms of their position in Norwich, then, they were of Norman-French background and associated with the occupying monarch. The Jews of Norwich were therefore set apart – by their connectedness to the Norman elite, by their special ‘royal’ status (as having royal protection) and in being associated with the new French part of the city. Thus ‘the attempt on the part of the clergy and the bishop to make Jews answer to a capital charge before the synod was manifestly an attempt to exercise jurisdiction over the king’s men’ (Jessop, 1896, quoted in Bennett, 2005, ibid.) Antisemitic accusations could therefore function as an expression of local grievances to Norman central authority: At that time Norwich was a city divided by conflicting loyalties and ethnicities – the Church versus the King, established families versus incomers, English against French. It is a classic recipe for tension and suspicion. It could be that the murder accusation arose in part of whole out of a longrunning resentment against the Norman population of the ‘new’ burgh, and was focused – as so often – on the most recent, most ‘foreign’, and apparently most privileged arrivals. (Bennett, 2005, p. 127) Generally, then, such events can be understood as a reflection of shifting economic relations between Christians and Jews arising from changing taxation practices introduced by the crown. As Stacey noted: Anti-Jewish sentiment in medieval Europe has a long and complex history behind it prior to 1240 which cannot be ignored. But Crown financial

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policy during these decades not only contributed to these attitudes; it also helped to structure the specific forms which anti-Jewish feeling assumed in mid-thirteenth-century England. (Stacey, 1988, p. 137) Notably, in this period the Crown imposed and then elaborated further systems of taxation that make the current discussions of financial ‘futures’ sound simple. A  Jewish community of fewer than 5,000 men, women and children became so pressured that many tried to leave the country but were prevented from doing so by the king closing the ports to all Jews seeking passage abroad. This captive population could then be coerced to bankroll Norman rule, although there were limits to how possible this was: In 1239 a different set of royal administrators attempted to levy from the Jews a third of all their debts and goods. The receipts from this levy were disappointing, however, and in 1241 a new tax of 20,000 marks was assessed for payment within a year. In 1244, a 60,000 mark tallage was proclaimed, to be collected over the following five years, although it appears that only about 40,000 marks were ever in fact assessed . . . in 1250 a new tax was announced, to extend over the following seven years. 100,000 marks were assessed in 1250, 4,500 marks in marks in 1251 and again in 1252. 5,000 marks in 1253 to support the king’s Gascon expedition, and 10,000 marks for the same purpose were assessed in 1254. An additional 2,000 marks were due in January 1255, after which Henry turned over all his rights to Jewish taxation to Richard of Cornwall, who was supposed to receive a further 8,000 marks from this source by the end of 1256. Richard soon discovered, however, that by 1255 the Jews simply could not produce such sums. . . . No further royal taxation of the Jews is recorded until Easter 1259, when the king initiated a yearly “arentation” of the Jewry at a rate of 1,000 marks per year, payable in two equal instalments at Easter and Michaelmas. (Stacey, pp. 137–138) Significantly, this period saw a complex combination of legal changes prompted by the king’s desire to extract more and more money from his subjects, and especially from Jews, that put enormous economic pressures on Jews: ‘Financially, the tallages produced a kind of spiral of collapse, in which Jewish creditors were forced to liquidate future assets to defray present burdens’ (Stacey, 129). Having exhausted their funds, they took out bonds: As the tax pressure mounted, Jews were increasingly forced to sell their bonds at deeper discounts than usual, or to accept far less than the face

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value of the bond from their debtors, simply because their own need to immediate cash was so pressing (139–40) A key twist in this story is that Christians, rather than other Jews, became the main purchasers of these bonds, such that in 1254 more than a quarter of the tax levelled on Jews was paid by Christians on their behalf. Jews also tried to leave. So when Christians took on such debts by buying them as bonds they too were pressurised to pay in ways that both dangerously heightened the visibility of Jews and exacerbated tensions between Christians and Jews. Stacey comments: Is it too far-fetched to see in Matthew’s vision of such aimless Jewish malevolence a reflection on the popular attitudes which were being engendered between 1240 and 1260, as the consequences of the king’s spoliative Jewish taxation worked themselves out in a similarly aimless and unpredictable way upon his Christian and Jewish subjects? (Stacey, 1988, p. 150) Finally, some accounts also highlight the coincidence of the ritual murder claims with changing religious iconography within Christianity – from an all-powerful father to a cult of Virgin mother, so the dangerous male figure was displaced onto Jews, as in: interestingly the myth of Jewish ritual murder in Europe begins at the very same time when the cult of the Virgin and the presentation of Mary as Mother and of Jesus as Child, a Mother-Son dyad, gains greater currency. This propagation of Mother-and-Child imagery hints at a regressive solution to an underlying religious conflict. When the importance of the close connection between mother and child, the unity of the Mother-Son dyad, could not be reconciled with the Christian pattern of the Father-Son relationship, escape away from and fear of the overly-powerful father image and a desire for the unbroken unity and security with the mother was shifted and transferred onto Jewish father figures. (Utz, 1999, pp. 34–35) The power of the libel: longevity and significance

Whatever the (combination of) explanations, these children lived, and they died unnatural deaths. William (of Norwich), Hugh (of Lincoln) and other children were killed, sometimes perhaps by accident, otherwise deliberately. But they were not killed by Jews. Indeed, there appears to be quite a lot of contemporary evidence that other parties were acknowledged to have killed the children in question, including that others eventually confessed to the murders (Bennett, 2005). So the more interesting question is why and how

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the accusations took such forms, and who believed them. These accusations – sometimes supported by confessions extracted under torture – were followed by massacres and hangings. For example, in the case of Hugh of Lincoln, Paris claims the accused man, Copin, was hung and 91 other Jews arrested, taken to London and imprisoned, of whom 18 of the richest and most important figures of the York Jewish community were hung, with the remaining saving their lives either by bribes or enlisting the intercession of Franciscan preachers (Utz, 1999, p. 25). Noting that few, if any, cases of blood libel have ever been upheld may be one kind of ‘justice’, perhaps. But somehow this fails to capture what is at issue in the generation of a myth, a legend that has lived on and on, as indicated by a version appearing in Chaucer’s ‘Prioresses Tale’ (in his Canterbury Tales) in the fourteenth century and sporadically reappearing, particularly in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century leaving cultural resonances available to be revived by the Nazis, and beyond. (Just to highlight the covert maintenance of such tropes, several commentators have identified the blood libel motif as present within QAnon discourse and discernible even in more mainstream outlets, such as in the recent film, Sound of Freedom, Bramesco, 2023; Rose, 2023; Times of Israel, 2023). Close inspection shows strange anomalies, absences and contradictions both within each story and in its relationship with others. These reveal the internecine ways the cultural economy of childhood relates to other culturalpolitical and material economies, and intersecting local, regional, national and international axes. Indeed, far from being aberrations from ordinary medieval life, analysts propose that such myths were central to its mode of existence: Like other false medieval accusations against the Jews, host desecrations and well-poisonings, the myth of Jewish ritual murder developed as one of the most virulent models of reading the world in medieval Christendom (Utz, 1999, p. 26) In relation to the iconography of the child, Bennett (2005, p. 120) summarises how ‘suspicion fell on the Jews, he [Thomas of Monmouth, a Norwich monk] wrote, “since it was agreed that no Christian would do such a thing” ’ (ibid.). Echoes occur in fifteenth-century Germany with the tales of Caesarius of Heisterbach in Germany, where childhood equates with the purity that supposedly Jews hate, as indicated in particular by ‘its joyous song and appearance’ (Jewish Virtual Library): In Cesarius’ version, the child sings the Salve Regina. The Jews cannot endure this pure laudatory song and try to frighten him and stop him from singing it. When he refuses [Cesarius writes] they cut off his tongue and hack him to pieces. (Jewish Virtual Library, op cit., page 3)

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One particularly sinister feature that emerges from these stories is the theme of collective responsibility – the claim was that the murderers of little Hugh invited all the Jews of Britain to the crucifixion (Jewish Virtual Library, op cit). In his efforts to refute the blood libel claim, in the early 1240s Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen both mobilised and reversed this, deciding to ‘have all the Jews in the empire killed if the accusation proved to be true, or exonerate them publicly if false. . . . The enquiry into the blood libel was thus turned into an all-Christian problem’ (ibid.). No claims could be sustained, and indeed even Pope Innocent IV in 1247 rejected the blood libel claim but to no effect. Indeed, versions of it have continued in stories, songs, and myths ever since, and – astonishingly – it was only in 1965 that the church officially repudiated the blood libel of Trent (ibid., 5). To summarise, ‘reasons’ put forward for the blood libel operate at the level of personal factors (Matthew Paris, the not-so-accurate chronicler); local issues (community tensions and politics in particular towns and cities); factors relating to the church (its need for martyrs and money; and its rivalry with the crown); national-level issues (changes in crown taxation policy); and international ideological and financial issues – the second crusades – which were, after all, waged against Jews as well as Muslims (and the need to pay for them – giving rise to a particular irony, since Jews were both subject to the crusades and forced to pay for them!). Accounts vary according to discipline and predilection as to which factors are most important. Overall, while we may allow that all are important, none can be absolutely distinguished from or separated from the others. Yet the issue is not to ‘explain’ the blood libel, for there can be no ‘rational’ explanation. Racism is not rational. It cannot entirely be explained or explained away, even if it underscored by or enacted in the conditions of racial capitalism. This is one of the problems that antiracist educators and activists struggle with. To address its affective hold on minds and bodies, a different regime of understanding must be employed. It is possible, for example, to contest the numbers on immigration statistics (if perhaps they helpfully indicate that emigration exceeds immigration, as was the case until recently in the UK), or how much money migrant workers make for national economies, or the great achievements of those who are or are descended from recent migrants, but somehow such arguments do not really touch the bedrock of implicit, inchoate fantasy convictions on which racism relies (see Burman, 2018, 2019a). Another take on equity and the child as an icon

Earlier, I described the child as an icon. An icon is a painted object of worship, some kind of fixed, elevated, often two-dimensional object engaged with from a distance. Icons are often fragile and (as the term ‘iconoclast’

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suggests) can be broken. An ‘against the grain’ (Benjamin, 1999, p. 248), or alternative, reading of ‘equity’ can be made alongside its association with justice. Perhaps significantly, from the United States there is a reading of ‘equity’ as ‘the value of a property in excess of any charges on it’ (MacDonald, 1978, p. 443). Unused as we may be to attach economic value to children in the modern world – although this is comparatively recent (Zelizer, 1994), the semiotic connection is worth pursuing. At play are also psychic economies – those that run alongside and in relation to political economies in which capitalism governs relationships, as well as objects, of production. In so-called developed countries, neoliberalism intensifies these relational aspects now that most manufacturing industries and raw materials in the Global North are exhausted or ‘outsourced’ to zones of cheaper and more flexible labour in the South. There are also significant connections with models of childhood – both as future citizens and as workers (Ailwood, 2008; Lister, 2005), as expressing the contemporary biopolitics of ‘risk’ (Nadeson, 2011) and in terms of the relationship with models of political subjectivity (Pupavac, 2002). According to this reading, the ‘equity’ of the child would be what remains when we take away the claims made about it. Or, rather, equity is what emerges as ‘in excess’ of these claims. Yet what if this ‘excess’ is not merely produced through arithmetical subtraction, but rather arises as a complex effect of those ‘charges’, that is, as demands on materially and psychically pressured resources? The point is that it may not be possible to know what the child is outside such calls, outside such distorting constraints. Yet there is a great pull for something, some ‘better self’ or some visionary address to what could be. As Walter Benjamin famously remarked: ‘we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That power cannot be settled cheaply’ (Benjamin, 1999, p. 246). Part of that implicit subterranean, out-of-the-reach of rational argument quality comes from the association with children, with childhood; and, in these cases, with religious imagery and commitments that can be mobilised to connect and unite people, unite them against others. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott was among the first to appreciate (Winnicott, 1949), the banal sentimentality that surrounds everyday talk about children, and is usually so unhelpful for them, indicates this kernel of feeling (see also Chapter 3); such that one usually encounters hostility if one tries to subject it to analysis. It sits with other ‘bedrock’ assumptions about human nature, of the order that Seshadri Crooks (2000) highlighted as covertly working to equate humanity with whiteness. As such, the trope of the child plays a significant, if not exclusive, role within axes of ‘racialisation’. At issue are questions of discipline and interdisciplinarity. I  have been dealing with – or perhaps this puts it too politely – running roughshod over – a range of disciplinary arenas – historical, philosophical and ideological

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analysis, including issues of literary reception. The question of methods and disciplines, and corresponding theoretical frameworks, needed for critical childhood studies has exercised some of the foremost commentators in the field (Alanen, 2011; Thorne, 2007). In her influential meditation on the ways power and memory converge, and her re-envisioning of sociology that can engage with the complexity of people’s lives and sensibilities, Avery Gordon (2008) called for methodologies that deal with the unsaid as well as the said, the invisible as well as the visible. The uncountable, scarcely speakable material that lingers on the borders of awareness but informs our dreams – and nightmares perhaps – does not figure in traditional sociological, or for that matter psychological or educational, approaches. Gordon argues that we need to attend to these shadowy features (what she calls ‘ghosts’) as part of a project exploring ‘the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts with the world’ (24). It is a question of responsibility that necessarily imports matters of value and stance, and there is no way this can be avoided. As she points out, we account for something and to others; our process of telling both recounts and distinguishes, so we might as well try to make good use of it: ‘It is a case of the difference it makes to start with the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish, or more commonly, with what we never even notice’ (25). As part of her analysis of the myriad ways power enters and structures our lives, Gordon (2008) discusses Toni Morrison’s description of ‘furniture without memories’ in terms of that sad and sunken couch that sags in just that place when an unrememberable past and an unimaginable future force us to sit day after day . . . everything of significance happens there among the inert furniture and the monumental social architecture. (Gordon, 3–4) I want to suggest that the child works like this in our minds, something that is just there in the background, something not particularly noticeable or important, just something that furnishes or supports other – much more ‘obvious’ – aspects of our lives (hence the titles of Parts II and III of this book). This figure of the child may appear ‘inert’, but this means its agency or activity is something that we have to work at, to make visible, to see what work it does in structuring how we move and shape our bodies around it; how it fits within the wider landscape of structures and relationships, what it maintains, affords and limits; that is, all that ‘. . . happens among the inert furniture and the monumental social architecture’. Gordon’s call to be receptive to ‘hauntings’ speaks to a project of rendering subjugated pasts into discourse. This is akin to Neil Cocks’ (2014) argument about reading the child from and in

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nineteenth-century English literature, where he writes of the importance of attending to the ‘peripheral’ as well as central status of the child: To return the child to certain canonical texts of nineteenth-century English literature is to work through a “permanent displacement” that is constitutive of meaning. It is to read the child as a ghost effect, a necessity, a forwarding and to hold out the promise of negotiation and working through. (179) Such analyses connect with the project of Child as method of problematising what is taken for granted, treating with suspicion what is presumed, and struggling to be open to possibilities that current political conditions disallow explicit articulation. Shifts, slippages and stumbling blocks Tropes are about stutterings, trippings. They are about breakdowns and that’s why they are creative. That is why you get somewhere you weren’t before, because something didn’t work. (Haraway, quoted in Gane & Haraway, 2006, p. 152)

Coming back to the present, what can we learn? Clearly, there are major conceptual and interpretive leaps in making connections between the status of Jews in medieval English cultural and economic life, as read through the trope of child ritual murder, and current concerns – notwithstanding some obvious repugnant resonances of this colonial history (within current fascist discourse). But it is the differences thrown up by such histories, as well as any similarities, that perhaps should also attract our attention. I will summarise this analysis by outlining three features. 1.  From boy to girl

One striking aspect of the early blood libel/child murder stories is that the focus was on boys. This is ‘accounted for’ in terms of the ways the murders were said to re-enact the crucifixion, with the boy child metonymically representing the divine child Jesus and his later fate, including his tortures and martyrdom. If the boy-god-child is the quintessential victim of this time, it is of a piece with the boy child as a prototypical subject under early capitalism, even if this has now shifted gender in its neoliberal forms to foreground relationality and people skills in knowledge-based economies. This invites us to think about why and how it is the girl child who now occupies this position as the subject of these discourses. Just to reiterate, this question concerns

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discourses rather than empirical realities. No boys were ritually murdered by Medieval Jews but probably more girls than boys are subjects of ‘honour’ crimes (see also Taefi, 2009; Gangoli et al., 2009). Some clues are offered in the interpretations of the trajectories of the blood libel and indeed in much later versions circulating in ballads and nursery rhymes into the twentieth century. Here the many versions of ‘little’ or ‘Sir’ Hugh are also supplemented by others such as ‘The Jew’s daughter’ where an adolescent girl lures a Christian boy into her father’s house where he is slaughtered and bled to death. Utz (1999) notes how, over the years, together with the increasing temporal distance from the medieval source texts and the new genre-specific demands, the ritual character of the murder and the religious affiliation of the girl become less and less important as the ballads concentrate more and more on themes such as seduction, initiation or love. (38) In addition to being perpetrators, by the late nineteenth-century girls are also victims, one celebrated example of which was the murder of a 14-year-old girl, Esther Solymosi, in the Hungarian village of Tisza Eszlar in April 1882. Here, the accusation was that the girl was lured into a local synagogue where she was slaughtered for ritual purposes. The story was made the subject of a play by Arnold Zweig in 1914 and was taken up in Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer (Malamud, 1966). The accusation attracted much public attention, within and beyond Hungary, and was the subject of three heated discussions in the Hungarian parliament, before – after a year and 33 days of court sessions – the case was dropped and all defendants acquitted. Utz (1999) notes that a new element in the mix brought to the fore by Zweig was its implicit sexual aspect. A similar case arose in Kutaisi (Georgia) in 1879 (Jewish Virtual Library, op. cit., page 8 of 10). Utz (1999) notes: Already in the three decades before the Tisza Eszlar case, the number of collective accusations against the Jewish minority for the ritual killing of children had diminished while those against Jewish men for the killing of Christian women had increased. (42) With the consolidation of heterosexual discourses, questions of gender and sexuality are by now much clearer concerns. Hence, the blood libel/child murder stories provide a particular and particularly long-lived narrative strand through which certain twists and turns in the iconography, the changing images and the meanings, of and about childhood – and its wider resonance with cultural-racialised models of ­

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subjectivity – can be traced. This shift of focus from boy to girl as the quintessential child victim can be read alongside Steedman’s (1995) account of the rise of the girl child as the personification of interiority in the early modern period. Obviously, there are as many histories of the meanings and forms of gender relations and identities as there are of childhood, but it is perhaps worth risking an overgeneralisation to claim that it is primarily girls who feature in child protection cases and prototypical child charity fund-raising campaigns in the Global North. The fact that child rights campaigners have had to make strenuous efforts to draw attention to the abuse of boys (e.g. Ennew, 1996; Kelly & Pringle, 2009) is a case in point. Symbolically, and for significant reasons, boys traverse the more public space of inter-community relations while girls are seen to embody the private. Eriksson (2009) proposed that boys’ supposed psychological immaturity so aligns with traditional notions of childhood that in fact the wishes and participatory rights of boys who do not conform to this notion have often been overlooked in social worker interventions. Meanwhile, girls partake of gendered discourses (of femininity as well as youth) that, within prevailing understandings, command certain sets of cultural associations (including modesty and passivity). Within Christian iconography at least, they personify deities less than they represent community property and propriety. They also invite readings in terms of enclosed space, the space of the home and the community. This brings me to my second point. 2.  The shifting scale of the stranger and neighbour?

It is widely assumed that antisemitism has taken the forms that it has owing to Jews’ position as one of Europe’s most long-standing indigenous minorities (as is also the case with Roma, another very significantly oppressed – and perhaps more oppressed – indigenous minoritised population). Discussions of the blood libel link its emergence and proliferating forms to economic and political factors affecting both the visibility of Jewish communities and the extent of contact between them and their Christian majority neighbours or compatriots. It is worth distinguishing between neighbours and compatriots, or fellow citizens, as this period of European history offers significant variation in its treatment of Jews and where they (were allowed to) live, from unrestricted congregation of settlements into communities to enforced segregation in walled ghettos. The ‘ritual murder’/blood libel accusations were levelled by Christians about the harm done to Christian boys by Jews and so were predicated on contexts where Jews interacted with and were settled alongside Christians. Unlike, say, discussions of ‘ritual’ or ‘satanic abuse’ which usually concern radical Christian communities (white and Black) of the global North, discussions of ‘honour crimes’ usually involve the gaze of the normative, and so

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presumed morally superior, Western subject onto others. Honour crimes are presumed to occur – perhaps within ‘our’ midst but not in ‘our’ communities. They are presented as alien intrusions from elsewhere, rather than – as Spivak’s (1993) analysis of sati or widow-burning in colonial India suggests – relationally constituted responses to particular cultural-political engagements in which the Western colonial spectator is complicit. The cultural register implied by the discourse of ‘honour’ has led many antiracist feminist activists to argue that ‘honour crimes’ should rather be understood and acted upon as forms of domestic violence (Siddiqui, 2003). 3.  The stickiness, mobility and ambiguity of ‘honour’

What is honour, then? It seems to function to compose and tie communities into relations of belonging. In Sara Ahmed’s (2004) terms, it is ‘sticky’ – it sets up particular connections or associations that are not necessary but seem difficult to avoid or shed. It sets up affective bonds that connect. But at the same time as they connect you and me, they also separate this ‘us’ that we have formed from ‘others’. ‘Honour’ is one of the cultural modes by which culture and community are formed. You honour me, I honour you; we all feel good. It is one of those rituals of mutual confirmation that also elaborates hierarchies of distinction, according to the value of their associated cultures and traditions, and, further, normalising such hierarchies. There may even be useful connections in this history. In his book, For Honour and Fame: chivalry in England 1066–1500, Nigel Saul (2011) claims links between medieval chivalric codes and the origins of the rules of engagement in war (though it is relevant to mention that there is no mention of Jews in the index; nor of the blood libel). He (rather anachronistically) extends his analysis to the Geneva Convention – a convention which is – as the saying goes, more ‘honoured’ in the breach than the observance. Significantly, honour topicalises love. Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1979) (already mentioned) discussion of antisemitism combines a reading of psychoanalysis with a Marxist analysis of the ravages of capitalist accumulation and exploitation. Their Freudian analysis of the group’s relationship with the leader via the sublimation of the people’s needs for power and fulfilment posits love as well as hate as a key element: ‘uncontrolled longing is channelled into nationalistic rebellion;. . . antisemitism is all that the German Christians have retained of the religion of love’ (176). More recently, Ahmed (2004) also addressed how hate crimes are explicitly discoursed as acts of love, where the hate is depicted as originating from elsewhere, shifted into the object of hatred, and instead subscribing to a narrative of ‘love as protection’. Love does not only enter such narratives as a way of being-for-others or being-for-the-nation, but also becomes a property of particular kinds of

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subject. Love, that is, reproduces the collective as ideal through producing a particular kind of subject whose allegiance to the ideal makes it an ideal in the first place. (Ahmed, 2004, p. 123) Indeed the 1,518-page document posted online by Andrew Berwick, the anglicised penname of the Norwegian, Anders Breivik, just before he went on his murderous rampage of student activists in Oslo and Utoya in June 2011, contains 80 mentions of ‘honour’. These not only included derogatory descriptions of supposedly Muslim practices but also claims about duty to, and honour of (his rendering of) ‘western culture’ that his actions sought to purify of ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘Islamic colonization’. Moreover, his claims were based on the codes and mores of the medieval Knights Templar – whose origins lie in the same period as the blood libel and ritual abuse murder cases discussed earlier. Here, it is relevant to note the significant shifts that have taken place in fascist discourse, which used to place so much emphasis on Jewish conspiracies, whereas younger fascists such as Breivik regarded this as simply wrong or irrelevant and placed Muslims and ‘cultural Marxists’ at the centre of the conspiracy. But if explicit reference to ‘Jews’ has disappeared from some fascist discourse (such that far-right groups now wave Israeli flags at their rallies, asserting an alliance with the state of Israel against – presumed Muslim – Palestinians), ‘cultural Marxists’ still carry Jewish significations (with Jews aligned both with communism, and of course with Marx himself, as well as overdetermined by the potent figure of the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, and so – as we have seen – straddling the contrary figures of both communist and capitalist. As Kofman (2005), tracing the vicissitudes of the cultural history of this trope, notes: Today the fear of divided loyalties and transnational political participation falls in particular upon Europe’s Muslim populations, who must demonstrate that they are not cosmopolitan. Thus what is interpreted positively in the privileged national is deemed to be negative and problematic in the migrant. (83) Final reflections

If there is something to learn from this rather sobering and gruesome history, some of which is still reality, perhaps three positive strategies can be identified. The first point is the importance of avoiding the abstraction structured within the notion of ‘the child’ that generalises from specific children, situated in particular contexts. Rather, what is needed is to illuminate the wider

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agendas constellated around ‘child’. In this chapter, I have tried to do this by attending both to specificities of, and shifts – across time and space – within trajectories of ritual abuse and honour crime narratives. This historical, geopolitically attuned discussion works to enable a clearer analysis of whose ‘honour’ (and whose interests) are at stake and so promote action to secure, or alternatively to counter, these. Second, such work enables attention to the gendered and cultural dynamics that surround children. This includes the interplay between these dynamics, including how they link to questions of cultural belonging, cultural exclusion, sociocultural reproduction and – increasingly – national identity, even as this is also articulated in relation to transnational agencies – whether UNICEF or the International Monetary Fund. Third, this highlights the necessity for feminist antiracist perspectives on questions of culture and honour that neither exonerate violence in the name of cultural difference or respect nor ignore the complexity of power relations through which such evaluations are made. While the historical focus here – on false accusations made towards Jews – has been specific, I see such specificities as promoting (rather than impeding) alliances across oppressed and minoritised groups, as well as illuminating how these groups are sometimes set against each other. So, returning to the example of the projects around domestic violence support for minoritised women discussed at the start of this chapter, the research team discovered each of the minoritised groups encountered very similar racialised gendered stereotypes (concerning the propensity to violence of the men of their community) as well as the reluctance of women to seek out service support for fear of encountering racism or of bringing further racist slurring of their communities. Moreover, since we were – via the design of the study – working across various minoritised communities (African, AfricanCaribbean, South Asian, Jewish, and Irish), talking with community service providers about how similar racialisations were directed towards each of the different communities appeared genuinely to dismantle some of the sense of particular stigmatisation, whilst also opening up greater possibilities for alliance between such groups. Even the fact that the project, in its design, crossed the Black–white binary (by focusing on Jewish and Irish as well as Asian, African and African-Caribbean survivors) helped to challenge some of the racialised narratives surrounding these questions, notwithstanding the very different forms of racism and oppression that attend more (currently, since Jews and Irish people have not always been considered ‘white’) visibly racialised groups, and also how questions of citizenship and immigration status tended to be more associated with the Black and Asian-identified groups (Burman, 2016). Such transnational features, that arise from very significant colonial histories, came to feature prominently in a subsequent project where,

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notwithstanding an explicit agenda to support migration and cross-country flight safely, the team formulated narrative and representational strategies that challenged presumed alignments of the former colonial context as inherently inferior and less secure than the colonial centre (Burman, 2010). An intersectional analysis of the relations between gender and nationalism, the dynamics of postcolonisation (that include epistemic as well as economic neocolonialism), as well as generation (since we were also dealing with questions of early and forced marriage – which usually concern girls but can also include boys and young men, Chantler, 2019), offered a vital analytic for the design, conduct and reporting of these studies, as well as giving rise to some significant policy recommendations. Alternative figurations of race, gender, embodiment and multispecies relations

I end this chapter with two examples, as a segue to the next. This chapter has traced a very specific set of connections between child, nation and cultural-religious persecution, in which socioeconomic conditions have been highlighted as constitutive. While the focus has been historical, and mainly concerned with one particular form of racism and one particular ‘take’ on how tropes of honour work with notions of a child, other directions are available. A rather different approach is taken in the speculative, science fiction work of Olivia E. Butler, who has been called the ‘mother of Afro-futurism’. Her 2005 novel, Fledgling, rehearses similar themes but in a very different way. She provides an alternative vampire story that, characteristically, dramatically reverses the usual dynamics of horror and identification of the genre to subjectify and invite connection with the previously vilified party. Vampires, like Ashkenazi Jews, are typically configured as originating in Eastern Europe (Transylvania), and indeed – as already noted – antisemitic imagery has sometimes depicted Jews, through the association with moneylending, as vampires in feeding off their Christian debtors. So we are not far from similar semiotic terrain. As with her other books, including the Xenogenesis trilogy (Butler, 1987– 1989) and the Patternist series (collected together as Seed to harvest, in Butler, 2007), in her final novel, Fledgling, Butler engages questions around the status of childhood, interspecies and within-species relationships (including intimate sexual and emotional but also economic relationships), in which racialisation figures in a potent way. She explores polyamory and its ethical and relational dilemmas, as well as disrupting prevailing gendered and heterosexed discourses. As is the case with Butler’s other writing, difference and variety are treated as positive resources to be embraced, rather than feared, although she also topicalises the fear that such forms of otherness can

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engender (including how this can be overcome). In Fledgling, it is the protagonist, Shori’s, black skin which makes her different from her species (who are all white), but this difference also opens up the opportunity for species survival (since her species – a rather noble and refined version of vampires called Ina) cannot survive in daylight. The story concerns how she encounters and then challenges the racism and rejection directed towards her from some of her own species (and relatives), which is based on fear but also envy, while the novel also explores the benefits of cross-species relationships (combining both parasitism and symbiosis). While the concept of childhood, as a period of immaturity and vulnerability (and, correspondingly adult-child hierarchical relationships) remains at play, the temporal scale is adjusted according to the much greater longevity accorded vampires in comparison with humans. Blood is food (for the vampires) and necessary for their sustenance, but the selected humans they feed from are shown to benefit in many ways. The novel charts a trajectory from Shori’s youth to her adulthood, that is becoming fully fledged – not only as an adult but a fully recognised and valued member of her culture and species. An area that puzzlingly remains uninterrogated in this novel, as is also the case in other Butler books (although this is also perhaps common to many – but not all – science fiction accounts), is the naturalisation of money, property ownership and capitalism. The Ina seem to be rich and prosperous, their individual and species longevity as well as enhanced abilities enables them to reap the benefit of long investments and to weather shorter term financial crises. They rule their households and adjudicate in their communities according to strict rules and codes of conduct that have the feel of feudal aristocracy. Honour and survival are key themes that also rely on love and labour. The second example is ‘Bloodchild’, a short story first published by Butler in 1984 (and later as part of a collection; see Butler, 1995), which takes consideration of interspecies relations and reproduction to another planet, where Terrans (presumed to be humans from earth) live with, and alongside, and gain (limited) protection from a worm or dragon-like species – the Tlic – who, it turns out, also rely on the humans for a key stage in their own procreation. This is a coming-of-age story with a difference, since the cognitive and physical maturation of the ‘chosen’ boy, Gan, is shown to involve his realisation that his role is to bodily host the embryonic larvae up to the point when they would consume him, at which point he would be sliced open and the worms removed to another, more dispensable animal. (It is implied that humans are too valuable to meet this fate, as sentient and consenting entities who are therefore easier to sustain and ‘manage’.) Universal themes of free will and (the constraints on) choice are at play – since Gan has been selected from his human family to fulfil this role from birth, so he feels acutely the sense of responsibility since another of his siblings will have to do this if he

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refuses. There is also a significant affective tie, a historical relationship with T’Gatoi, the Tlic whose progeny he will bear, that is structured because of this expectation albeit that he only just comes to appreciate that why this is. While, in her Afterword, Butler claims this story is not about slavery, there are clear echoes of the exploitation and instrumentalisation of reproductive processes for the maintenance of labour as well as the sexual gratification of the slave owners. Just as in Fledgling Butler explores the polyamoric dynamics of Shori’s household as complicated and requiring her careful management, so too questions of loyalty, rivalry and competition structure relations between both the human family and their Tlic-enhanced configuration. Butler has claimed ‘Bloodchild’ is an exploration of male pregnancy, and it certainly does offer a singular perspective on a process that, for women, is either deemed natural (rather than violent) or else medicalised (with its violence correspondingly sanctioned), as well as linking with more recent discussions of the emotional dynamics of surrogacy. Here, blood is what the embryonic Tlic feeds on, and it is what the human hosts provide, for a significant period. Blood is life, rather than death, with Gan as the bloodchild, the chosen child who is now becoming an adult and who, in honouring this commitment, will sustain the continuing protection of his human family through this act of (re)productive labour, as well as physically nourishing the Tlic young. Equally, the offspring of the Tlic are bloodchildren, as parasites fed by the blood of their hosts. As ever, Butler explores her long-standing concerns about fecundity and sterility in these texts, as well as species continuation and strengthening. Importantly, far from its nationalist and fascist connotations, blood is not only about species or territorial specificity, but of species connection, even if this connection is transactional and coerced. Butler also suggests that Bloodchild is an exploration of what ‘paying the rent’ might involve for humans living on an alien planet. The Preserve is not quite the plantation, nor the ghetto. What she especially attends to is how affective ties are forged through relationships, rather than presumed from species or other biological similarity, while the concept of kinship (which I discuss in later chapters) is subjected to a sustained deconstruction and rearticulation by Butler across axes of race, time, gender and sexuality in her earlier novel, Kindred (Butler, 1979) as a specific exploration of slavery and its legacies. So, to close this chapter, Butler’s texts offer engagements with themes of blood, honour, race and adult–child relations that are very different from the analysis undertaken earlier (on the Blood libel and so-called honour crimes), even as they also explore their psychic and embodied as well as racialised and cultural-political forms. What Butler also introduces, however, and comes into the frame of these stories’ narratives, is the ambiguity and connection between child, animal and other. Racism, of course, always involves dehumanisation as a particular warrant for the withholding of subjecthood to those positioned as other and ‘less than’. Fledgling and ‘Bloodchild’, in

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their titles as well as plot, explore cross-species relationships and identifications, with the protagonist in the first figured in the title as a baby bird. It is this human, more-than-human, and animal (or humanimal) set of relations (Seshadri, 2012; Chen, 2012), as well as traversing gender, race and childhood, and the messy, embodied, transcorporeal processes of birth and death, that occupy the next chapters. References Adorno, A.,  & Horkheimer, M. (1955/1979). Elements of anti-semitism: Limits of enlightenment. In A. Adorno & M. Horkheimer (Eds.), Dialectic of enlightenment (pp. 168–208). Verso. Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press. Ailwood, J. (2008). Learning or earning in the “smart state”. Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 15(4), 535–551. Alanen, L. (2011). Critical childhood studies? Childhood, 18(2), 147–150. Anthias, F. (2020). Translocational belongings: Intersectional dilemmas and social inequalities. Routledge. Arditti, R., Duelli Klein, R., & Minden, S. (Eds.). (1989). Test-tube women: What future for motherhood? Pandora. Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood. Cape. Aydarova, E., Millei, Z., Piattoeva, N.,  & Silova, I. (2016). Revisiting pasts, reimagining futures: Memories of (post) socialist childhood and schooling. European Education, 48(3), 159–169. Baird, B. (2008). Child politics, feminist analyses. Australian Feminist Studies, 23(57), 291–305. Benjamin, W. (1999). Theses on the philosophy of history. In W. Benjamin (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 245–255). Pimlico. Bennett, G. (2005). Towards a revaluation of the legend of “Saint” William of Norwich and its place in the blood libel legend. Folklore, 116, 119–139. Bhattacharyya, G. (2018). Rethinking racial capitalism: Questions of reproduction and survival. Rowman & Littlefield. Bilge, S. (2014). Whitening intersectionality. Racism and Sociology, 5, 175–205. Bilge, S. (2020). The fungibility of intersectionality: An Afropessimist reading. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43(13), 2298–2326. Bourke, J. (2007). Rape: A history from 1869 to the present day. Virago. Bramesco, C. (2023, July 6). Sound of freedom: THe QAnon-adjacent thriller seducing America | Film |. The Guardian. Retrieved August 9, 2023. Britzman, D. (1997). Difference in a minor key: Some modulations of history, memory and community, In M. Fine, L. Weis, L. Powell, & L. Wong (Eds.), Off white: Readings on race, power and society (pp. 29–39). Routledge. Brons, L. L. (2015). Othering, an analysis. Transcience, 6(1), 69–90. Bruhm, S., & Hurley, N. (Eds.). (2004). Curioser: On the queerness of children. University of Minnesota Press. Burman, E. (2008). Beyond “women and children” and “women vs. children”: Engendering childhood and reformulating motherhood. International Journal of Child Rights, 16(2), 177–194.

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Burman, E. (2010). Between justice and pathologisation: Juxtapositions of epistemic and material violence in transnational migration and domestic violence research. In J. Schostak,  & G. Schostak (Eds.), Researching violence, democracy and the rights of people (pp. 42–60). Routledge. Burman, E. (2016). Organising for change? Group-analytic perspectives on a feminist action research project. In J. Maratos (Ed.), Applications of group analysis for the twenty-first century (pp. 119–138). Karnac. Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). Routledge. Burman, E. (2018). Brexit, “child as method,” and the pedagogy of failure: How discourses of childhood structure the resistance of racist discourse to analysis. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 40(2), 119–143. Burman, E. (2019a). Fanon, education, action: Child as method. Routledge. Burman, E. (2019b). Child as method: Implications for decolonising educational research. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 28(1), 4–26. Burman, E. (2020). Developments: Child, image, nation (2nd ed.). Routledge. Burman, E. (2022). Child as method and/as childism: Conceptual–political intersections and tensions. Children & Society, 27(4), 1027–1036. Burman, E., & Chantler, K. (2005). Domestic violence and minoritisation: Legal and policy barriers facing minoritised women leaving violent relationships. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 28(1), 59–74. Burman, E.,  & Chantler, K. (2009a, April). Research and social policy: A  forced marriage? Discourse, power and resistance conference. Manchester Metropolitan University. Burman, E., & Chantler, K. (2009b, April). Research and social policy: A forced marriage? Unpublished paper presented at discourse, power and resistance conference, Manchester Metropolitan University. Burman, E., Chantler, K.,  & Batsleer, J. (2002). Service responses to South Asian women who attempt suicide or self-harm. Critical Social Policy, 22(4), 641–669. Burman, E., & Millei, Z. (2022). Post-socialist geopolitical uncertainties: Researching memories of childhood with ‘child as method’. Children  & Society, 36(5), 993–1009. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12551 Burman, E., Smailes, S.,  & Chantler, K. (2004). ‘Culture’ as a barrier to domestic violence services for minoritised women. Critical Social Policy, 24(3), 358–384. Burman, E., & Stacey, J. (2010). The child and childhood in feminist theory. Feminist Theory, 11(3), 227–240. Butler, O. E. (1979). Kindred. Doubleday. Butler, O. E. (1987–1989). Xenogenesis. Grand Central Publishing. Butler, O. E. (1995). Bloodchild and other stories. Four walls, eight windows. Seven Stories Press. Butler, O. E. (2005). Fledgling. Langton. Butler, O. E. (2007). Seed to harvest. Warner Books. Cannella, G., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization. Routledge. Castañeda, C. (2002). Figurations: Child, bodies, worlds. Duke University Press. Chantler, K. (2019). Men’s experiences of forced marriage: Ain’t I a man? In M. Idriss (Ed.), Men, masculinities and honour-based abuse (pp. 60–78). Routledge. Chantler, K., Burman, E., & Batsleer, J. (2003). South Asian women: Systematic inequalities in services around attempted suicide and self harm. European Journal of Social Work, 6(2), 34–48.

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Chantler, K., Gangoli, G., & Hester, M. (2009). Forced marriage in the UK: Religious, cultural, economic or state violence? Critical Social Policy, 29(4), 587–612. Chen, K. H. (2010). Asia as method: Toward deimperialization. Duke University Press. Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press. Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. W., & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies: Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of women in culture and society, 38(4), 785–810. Cockersell, P. (2019). Intercultural psychotherapy, intracultural psychotherapy, or just good psychotherapy? In B. Ababio & R. Littlewood (Eds.), Intercultural therapy: Challenges, insights and developments (pp. 94–104). Routledge. Cocks, N. (2014). The peripheral child in nineteenth century literature and its criticism. Springer. Cohen, S. (1987). It’s the same old story: Immigration controls against Jewish, Black and Asian people, with special references to Manchester. Manchester City Council. Cohen, S. (1988). From the Jews to the Tamils: Britain’s mistreatment of refugees. Manchester Law Centre. Cohen, S. (2006). Standing on the shoulders of the fascism: From immigration control to the strong state. Trentham Books. Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). Intersectionality. Wiley. Crenshaw, K. (1990). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, 1241. de Beauvoir, S. (1971). The second sex. Knopf. Dhaliwal, S., & Yuval-Davis, N. (Eds.) (2014). Women against fundamentalism: Stories of dissent and solidarity. Lawrence and Wishart. Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press. Ennew, J. (1996). The sexual exploitation of children. Polity. Erel, U., Haritaword, J., Gutierrez Rodriguez, E., & Klesse C. (2011). On the depoliticisation of intersectionality talk: Conceptual multiple oppressions in critical sexuality studies. In Y. Taylor, S. Hines, & M. Casey (Eds.), Theorizing intersectionality and sexuality (pp. 56–77). Palgrave. Eriksson, M. (2009). Girls and boys as victims: Social workers’ approaches to children exposed to violence. Child Abuse Review, 18, 428–445. Fanon, F. (1952/1970). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.) Paladin. Fraser, N.,  & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or recognition? A  political-­ philosophical exchange. Verso. Gane, N.,  & Haraway, D. (2006). When we have never been human, what is to be done? Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture  & Society, 23(7–8), 135–158. Gangoli, G., Chantler, K., Hester, M., & Singleton, A. (2011). Understanding forced marriage: Definitions and realities. In A. Gill  & A. Sundari (Eds.), Forced marriage: Introducing a social justice and human rights perspective. Zed. Gangoli, G., McCarry, M., & Razak, A. (2009). Child marriage or forced marriage? South Asian communities in North-East England. Children  & Society, 23(6), 418–429. Gill, A., & Sundari, A. (Eds.). (2011). Forced marriage. Zed.

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Gill-Peterson, J. (2015). The value of the future: The child as human capital and the neoliberal labor of race. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 43(1/2), 181–196. Gilman, S. (1993). Freud, race and gender. Princeton University Press. Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. University of Minnesota Press. Grzanka, P. R. (2017). Undoing the psychology of gender: Intersectional feminism and social science pedagogy. In K. A. Case (Ed.), Intersectional pedagogy: A model for complicating identity and social justice (pp. 61–79). Routledge. Grzanka, P. R. (2020). From buzzword to critical psychology: An invitation to take intersectionality seriously. Women & Therapy, 43(3–4), 244–261. Harrowitz, N. (1994). Anitisemitism, misogyny and the logic of cultural difference. University of Nebraska Press. Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (2012). The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press. Hutnyk, J. (2004). Photogenic poverty: Souvenirs and infantilism. Journal of Visual Culture, 3(1), 77–94. Jackson, Z. I. (2015). Outer worlds: The persistence of race in movement “beyond the human”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2), 215–218. Jewish Virtual Library. Blood libel. Retrieved August  9, 2023, from http://www. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0003_0_03147.html Jha, P., Kesler, M. A., Kumar, R., Ram, F., Ram, U., Aleksandrowicz, L., Bassani, D. G., Chandra, S., & Banthia, J. K. (2011). Trends in selective abortions of girls in India: Analysis of nationally representative birth histories from 1990 to 2005 and census data from 1991 to 2011. The Lancet, 377(9781), 1921–1928. Kelly, L.,  & Pringle, K. (2009). Gender and child harm. Child Abuse Review, 18, 367–371. Kofman, E. (2005). Figures of the cosmopolitan: Privileged nationals and national outsiders. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 18(1), 83–97. Lister, R. (2005). Investing in the citizen workers of the future. In H. Hendrick (Ed.), Child welfare and social policy (pp. 449–462). Policy Press. MacDonald, A. (Ed.). (1978). Chambers twentieth century dictionary. Chambers. Malamud, B. (1966). The fixer. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. Routledge. Merewether, J. (2019). Listening with young children: Enchanted animism of trees, rocks, clouds (and other things). Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 27(2), 233–250. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor. Duke University Press. Michael, M., King, L., Guo, L., McKee, M., Richardson, E., & Stuckler, D. (2013). The mystery of missing female children in the Caucasus: An analysis of sex ratios by birth order. International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 97–102. Molloy, L. (2020). The ideas of Frantz Fanon and practices of cultural safety with Australia’s first peoples. In L. Turner & H. A. Neville (Eds.), Frantz Fanon’s psychotherapeutic approaches to clinical work (pp. 183–196). Routledge. Moradi, B. (2017). (Re)focusing intersectionality: From social identities back to systems of oppression and privilege. In A. R. Fischer, K. J. Bieschke, & R. M. Perez

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(Eds.), Handbook of sexual orientation and gender diversity in counseling and psychotherapy (pp. 105–127). APA. Nadeson, M. H. (2011). Governing childhood into the 21st century. Palgrave. Nash, J. (2008). Re-thinking intersectionality. Feminist Review, 89, 1–15. Nxumalo, F. (2017). Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances. Children’s Geographies, 15(5), 558–569. Osgood, J. (2019). You can’t separate it from anything! Glitter’s doings as materialised figurations of childhood (and) art. Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art, 111–136. Phoenix, A., & Pattynama, P. (2006). Intersectionality. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13, 187–192. Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgement of the child. Penguin. Pines, N. (2018). The infrahuman: Animality in modern Jewish literature. SUNY. Pollack, L. (1983). Forgotten children. Cambridge University Press. Pon, G. (2009). Cultural competency as new racism: An ontology of forgetting. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 20(1), 59–71. Pupavac, V. (2002). The international children’s rights regime. In D. Chandler (Ed.), Re-thinking human rights: Critical approaches to international politics (pp. 57–75). Palgrave. Riley, D. (1987). The serious burdens of love? Some questions on childcare-­feminism and socialism. In A. Phillips (Ed.), Feminism and equality (pp. 176–198). Blackwell. Rober, P., & De Haene, L. (2014). Intercultural therapy and the limitations of a cultural competency framework: About cultural differences, universalities and the unresolvable tensions between them. Journal of Family Therapy, 36, 3–20. Rose, S. (2023, August 22). ‘The film the woke Nazis don’t want you to see!’ How the culture wars made Sounds of Freedom a blockbuster. Guardian. Retrieved August  25, 2023, from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/aug/22/the-filmthe-woke-nazis-dont-want-you-to-see-how-the-culture-wars-made-sound-of-free dom-a-blockbuster Saul, N. (2011). For honour and fame: Chivalry in England 1066–1500. Random House/The Bodley Head. Seshadri, K. (2012). HumAnimal: Race, law, language. University of Minnesota Press. Seshadri Crooks, K. (2000). Desiring whiteness: A  Lacanian analysis of race. Routledge. Shepherd, L. J. (2012). Gender, violence and popular culture: Telling stories. Routledge. Siddiqui, H. (2003). ‘It was written in her kismet’: Forced marriage. In R. Gupta (Ed.), From homebreakers to jailbreakers: Southall Black Sisters (pp. 51–66). Zed. Silova, I., Millei, Z., & Piattoeva, N. (2017). Interrupting the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education: Postsocialist and postcolonial dialogues after the Cold War. Comparative Education Review, 61(S1), S74–S102. Spender, D. (1985). Man-made language (2nd ed.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. Spivak, G. C. (1993). Can the subaltern speak? In P. Williams & L. Chrisman (Eds.), Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory (pp. 66–112). Harvester. Stacey, J.,  & Suchman, L. (2012). Animation and automation–The liveliness and labours of bodies and machines. Body & Society, 18(1), 1–46. Stacey, R. (1988). 1240–60: A  watershed in Anglo-Jewish relations? Historical Research, LXI(145), 135–150.

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Steedman, C. (1995). Strange dislocations: Childhood and the idea of human interiority 1780–1930. Routledge. Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child: Or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Duke University Press. Taefi, N. (2009). The synthesis of age and gender: Intersectionality, international human rights law and the marginalisation of the girl-child. International Journal of Child Rights, 17(3), 345–376. Thomson, J., & Linnell, S. (2020). Enchanted encounters with the liveliness of matter and art forcing thought. Emotion, Space and Society, 35, 1755–4586. Thorne, B. (1987). Re-envisioning women and social change: Where are the children? Gender & Society, 1(1), 85–109. Thorne, B. (2007). Crafting the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. Childhood, 14(3), 147–152. Times of Israel. (2023, July  22). Surprise blockbuster ‘Sound of Freedom’ echoes antisemitic QAnon conspiracies. The Times of Israel. Retrieved August 9, 2023. Ueno, C. (2004). Nationalism and gender. Transpacific Press. Utz, R. (1999). The medieval myth of Jewish ritual murder: Toward a history of literary reception. Year’s Work in Medievalism, 14, 23–36. Walkerdine, V., & Lucey, H. (1989). Democracy in the kitchen: Regulating mothers and socialising daughters. Virago. Winnicott, D. (1949). Hate in the countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 69–74. Yuval-Davis, N. (1998). Gender and nation. Sage. Yuval-Davis, N. (1999). What is transversal politics? Soundings, 12, 94–98. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Intersectionality and feminist politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3), 193–209. Yuval-Davis, N., & Anthias, F. (Eds.). (1989). Woman-nation-state. Macmillan. Zelizer, V. A. (1994). Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children. Princeton University Press.

2 CHILDREN AND/AS ANIMALS Developmental hierarchies, affinities and solidarities

This chapter considers sociohistorical and legal consequences of particular mixings and metamorphoses between animals and children. The focus is on how conceptions of animals and children intersect with colonial discourses via their complex relations with familial and gendered dynamics. A key preoccupation – throughout this chapter and this book – concerns the contested connections between the positions of women and children that, arguably, neither feminists nor children’s rights theorists have addressed sufficiently. This contest arises precisely because of the ways women’s and children’s positions have been set against each other, which in turn occurs because, as subjugated groups, both have – like colonial subjects – been associated with ‘nature’ – in both its primitivising and romanticising senses. Once such equations and elisions are taken seriously, then, they invite further questions around political affinities and possible solidarities, rather than contests. This is where Child as method explores the complex interplays between the subordinated (or, alternatively, privileged) status of the child and other abjected and oppressed parties, crossing disciplines as well as continents. Animals play a role in this story – not merely as the ‘base’ link of the chain of being, but in more complicated ways that inflect and interact with the other parties – not only within conceptions of social order and disorder – but also in rather direct ways in relation to the gendered division of labour. As will be explored here, Alice’s rescue of the baby that turns into a pig in Alice in Wonderland also marks a moment of transition in prevailing understandings of children and animals that occurs alongside and through Empire, models of the family and industrialisation. This chapter reviews some contested crossovers and substitutions of child–animal relations to highlight, in particular, how gender relations and women’s social positioning DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-4

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have historically come to articulate both emerging technical (scientific) and popular cultural configurations connecting ‘child’, ‘animal’ and ‘nature’. The emergence of the girl child as the touchstone of interiority and subjectivity (Steedman, 1995) not only underpinned the exclusionary teleology of the ‘great chain of being’ that offered a pseudoscientific legitimation of colonialism but also its paradoxes as well as oppressions still thrive. Some historical and recent examples of repetitions and reformulations of child–animal relations, drawn from both cultural and welfare contexts, are explored as indicative of the postcolonial, common-world political possibilities also envisaged by a Child as method orientation. A concern of this chapter is conceptual, that is, to resist simple conflations between animals, children, women and colonial subjects without attention to which the insult to all is reiterated. Amid calls of ‘becoming animal’, as a critique of the exclusionary character of the ‘human’ in humanitarianism, it matters which animals we are talking about – dogs as part of the household, or pigs as part of the household economy, for example (or what Braidotti, 2013, p.  68, differentiates as oedipalised, instrumentalised or fantasmatic anthropocentric representations of animals). I will return to this question of specificity at the end in relation to methodological process as well as species, and this focus is taken further in Chapter 3. Equally, notwithstanding the need to address colonial legacies, attention to their specificities, in their spatial as well as temporal extensions, is necessary. This matters in terms of understanding the formation of racialised and colonial dynamics. In relation to colonial Britain, it is important to recall that Britain’s first colony was Ireland, as well as that (as discussed in Chapter 1) some of the lands now comprising Britain were in earlier times occupied by France. British children are all taught the story of the Battle of Hastings in 1066 but know rather less about the range of its consequences. Indeed, the previous chapter highlighted connections between children, law and the origins of European racism in the blood libel charges levelled at Jews for the ritual slaughter of Christian (boy)children. As discussed there, although no cases were ever upheld, such narratives formed a key basis for subsequent racisms. Though bearing these earlier forms in mind, in this chapter I take as a primary initial frame for the analysis of colonialism its more recent forms that are based on (pseudo)scientific theory and inscribed with claims of rationality and progress. Since histories are told backwards, in hindsight, as histories of the present (Foucault, 2001), my approach here will be to move between the past and present. I do so not to confirm the current story, nor to mine for origin stories, but rather precisely to estrange some assumed continuities or legacies and so, hopefully, render open other possibilities. In terms of sources, resources and agendas, as a critical, feminist psychologist and educationalist, I have a commitment to disturbing the expert-popular binary, and indeed,

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history indicates their intimate connections. And so, connecting supposedly scientific fact with fiction (high and low), we come to Alice and the pig-baby, who will guide us through my narrative here. Grunts and sneezes Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases. (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Collected Works of Lewis Carroll, 1965a, p. 65)

I invoke Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll’s iconic works notwithstanding the vast tracts of diverse literary and philosophical scholarship these have inspired, from artificial intelligence (Hofstadter, 1980) to queer theory (Bruhm & Hurley, 2004). Nor to engage in ad hominem analysis, although I will mobilise some biographical details as I see relevant to my argument. It is said, for example, that Dodgson was drawn to children’s company because of his ‘incurable nervous stammer’, which did not afflict him when he was with them (Lancelyn Green, 1965, p. 17). As Lancelyn Green put it, in fact ‘the Dodo was Dodgson himself (“Do-do-dodgson” he called himself when he stammered)’ (ibid., 15), so claiming an identification with a now-extinct bird, once native to Mauritius, whose demise is directly linked to colonialism. Quite what it was about children that enabled Dodgson to overcome his stammer is unclear. At any rate, Dodgson’s interest in little girls places him alongside other Victorian gentlemen whose concern for children, as has been widely discussed, mingled erotic and welfare considerations (Kincaid, 1992; Steedman, 1995). As well as being a rather ‘dull’ (Lancelyn Green, ibid., 13) Oxford mathematics lecturer, the Reverend Dodgson was at the vanguard of his times as a pioneer of photography, especially of children. (Cue also analysis of scopophilia and seduction, McClintock, 1995). Dodgson’s address, unlike Henry Mayhew – the paternalistic parliamentarian whose concern about working children led him to propose regulatory legislation – was to (or with) the middle-class child – whose mind as well as body, as Shuttleworth (2013) documents, became a site of great interest and investigation to Victorians. Dodgson was certainly a significant participant in this trend, as is indicated by the Preface to (the lesser known) Sylvie and Bruno (a text that attempted to engage both adult and child readers, which was largely regarded as unsuccessful). In this Preface, Dodgson holds forth on the role of literature as moral education as well as comfort and entertainment, in particular opining on the importance of preparing expurgated versions of

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core cultural texts such as Shakespeare, for young and especially female readers, advocating for further editing beyond those already prepared by Bowdler, claiming that: ‘The resulting book might be slightly fragmentary: but it would be a real treasure to all British maidens who have any taste for poetry’ (Carroll, 1965b, p. 362). (It is also clear that he did not welcome proposals for women students to be admitted to Oxford, on the grounds of how they would disturb and disrupt the primary task of the university, which was to educate young men, but rather proposed there should be a separate women’s university; see Carroll, 1965c.) Yet, to return to the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland addressing her ‘little boy’, how can the discursive field set in play be interpreted? Clearly the Duchess’s sentiment rehearses well-established narratives that children are naughty, children are wilful, and children need the discipline that harks back to the first forms of what might be understood as childcare advice. Research on these texts portrays them as more concerned with preparing children and their parents for death in contexts of very high rates of infant and child mortality, than for life, as informed also by notions of original sin (Newson & Newson, 1973). This is part of a narrative that childhood is not a special, different period of life, but rather that portrays children as deficient or deviant adults in need of training. Such ideas have continued to figure prominently within supposedly ‘modern’, behaviourist approaches to feeding, weaning, and training children. Indeed (nicely combining the child–animal conflation with the colonial theme), the New Zealander Sir Frederic Truby King famously applied methods based on stock-rearing of calves to feeding practices in humans, and his approach influenced British mothers up to the 1940s. As a daughter (West, 2007) brought up according to Truby King’s advice recollected: “Babies”, he [Truby King] said are “controlling and manipulative from birth, and it is necessary to teach them obedience by making them learn that crying will get them nowhere”. He considered it “a dangerous indulgence” to respond to a baby’s crying: “crying is necessary for health, essential exercise for the lungs”. Her account (West, 2007) is preceded by many other similar accounts from mothers regretting their subscription to this approach (see Newson & Newson, 1973). As is well known, Alice was based on stories told to Alice Liddell and her sisters in 1862. Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865; that is, precisely after the founding in London of Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in 1824 (which gained its ‘royal’ status in 1840) some 50 years before the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). (The latter – significantly – did not inscribe its eventual

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‘royal’ status, gained in 1895, within its name to avoid confusion with its predecessor.) The account of the Duchess appears to be at best somewhat cavalier in her treatment of the baby she is nursing, while the context, the hazardous kitchen in which the cook is busy hurling implements around, is at best chaotic if not unsafe. Dodgson can perhaps be read as (even if ironically) articulating concerns about child welfare and questions of individual moral philosophy (see later: ‘Wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?’) that were surfacing at this time. The Duchess’ care is clearly perceived as inadequate by Alice, and the narrative continues: “If I don’t take this child away with me”, thought Alice, “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two. Wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?”. She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). “Don’t grunt”, said Alice; “that’s not at all a nice way of expressing yourself”. (64) It is hard to know how typical or atypical, shocking or amusing, such comparisons between children and animals were at that time, and so to evaluate in what senses a child might ‘become’ a pig. Or how the pig was deemed to be ‘like’ a baby, or the baby like a pig. In his literary analysis of metamorphosis, Massey (1976) writes of this example: A pig is, after all, comestible; and one wonders whether this particular baby has not escaped from the vicinity of the kitchen in the nick of time. The metamorphosis serves to solidify and to justify a refusal of empathy with the baby that has already been thickly foreshadowed in the kitchen scene. (79, emphasis added) (Hence, beyond the pepper thrown about by the cook that generates the sneezing/grunting attracting Alice’s attention, and that prompts the Duchess’ chant to her baby, the kitchen would also be the place where a pig would be cooked and with which it would be seasoned.) Noteworthy here is that the baby only comes to resemble a pig after the Duchess addresses it as such, perhaps reflecting Dodgson’s wider philosophical interests in linguistics, here is how the naming produces the entity it indicates. These literary connections also invite the recollection that pigs were tried for misdemeanours in medieval Europe (Evans, 1906). Indeed, accounts of such animal–human comparisons circulated in ‘high culture’ accounts, including that of one of Dodgson’s contemporaries, Victor Hugo in 1832) (Schiff Berman, 1994, p. 299), while Schiff Berman (1994) notes these themes

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occurring earlier as in Racine’s 1669 parody, Les Plaideurs, where the defence counsel successfully appealed the capital sentence for a dog that has eaten a capon on the basis that her puppies would otherwise be left orphans, illustrating a combination of animal anthropomorphism with a naturalisation of maternal relations of care. This parody of an ageing judge is said to be based, in turn, on Aristophanes’ play of 422 BC in which he satirises not only a military dictator but also the law courts. Racine, however, expunges the specific historical satire from his version of the story to render it solely comic. It would seem, therefore, that these are long-standing themes. Yet this is not simply a succession model of protection built on analogy (from animals, so to children). Nor, significantly, is a direct parallel made between cruelty to animals and cruelty to children, except insofar as one prompted the organisational model for the other. For there was a crossover of personnel between the RSPCA and the NSPCC which extended, at the beginning of the NSPCC, to the sharing of premises. Nevertheless, the subsequent divergence between the two organisations reflects how rather different ontologies were accorded to animals and children, as well as other influences, routed via the USA. While the RSPCA was the first animal welfare organisation established worldwide, accounts (such as Flegel, 2009) suggest that the NSPCC was inspired by a US, rather than British, parallel made between animal and child welfare concerns. Flegel (2009) describes how the US precursor to the NSPCC arose through Etta Wheeler and Henry Berg enlisting the support of the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) in bringing a case for protection of a girl, Mary Ellen, in New York. Much has been made since of possible interactions between the two forms of maltreatment, as the NSPCC guidance has suggested (Becker, 2001), although Patterson-Kane and Piper (2009) have also advised against easy equation. On a historical basis too, animals and children have occupied different places within (Christian) religious discourses that have their reflection in contrasting conceptions of agency, protection and responsibility (see Bunge, 2011, for discussion of Muslim and Jewish conceptions). This connects also with Schiff Berman’s (1994) discussion (based on Evans’, 1906, account) of the medieval trials in Europe of animals (and other non-human entities, including insects and statues), which elaborate competing narratives ranging from animals’ intrinsic innocence to their demonic associations. Here, questions of attributed reputation could also figure decisively, as with the eighteenth-century case of a man found having sex with a donkey where affidavits were brought to court confirming the donkey’s kind disposition and good behaviour, as well as having been subject to coercion. in 1750 at Vanres, France, a man and a donkey, discovered in an act of copulation, were both charged with bestiality, but while the man was sentenced to death, the donkey was subsequently acquitted on the ground

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that she was the victim of violence, and had not participated in her master’s crime of her own free will. At the trial, the defense had presented a statement signed by many inhabitants of the community stating that they had known the donkey for four years, and that “she had always shown herself to be virtuous and well-behaved both at home and abroad and had never given occasion of scandal to anyone”, and that therefore “they were willing to bear witness that she is in word and deed and in all her habits of life a most honest creature”. (Schiff Berman, 1994, translated from Evans, 1906, pp. 300–301) It seems this saved the donkey, whether because they were deemed an unwilling party or else not competent to dissent (as well as being ‘in word and deed . . . honest’). Flegel also discusses how the NSPCC went through various moves to arrive at a narrative that failed to engage with such complexities as children’s harm to animals, in favour of maintaining an address to, and image, of the (child and animal as) deserving victim. What can be taken from this is how it took some work to turn children into as deserving recipients of aid as animals. Moreover, this shift was at the price of installing a colonial narrative, while also designating some children as unworthy of intervention. By the mid-nineteenth century, while babies might have become worthy of saving, Alice is portrayed as evaluating that holding a pig transgresses appropriate thresholds of engagement, even as it is now clear that animals only recently and variably were accorded ignorance or innocence. Rather, the pig now evokes some disgust: “If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear”, said Alice, seriously, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!”. The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which) (64). Eventually she puts it down ‘. . . and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood’ (64). The (now fully transformed) pig is returned to its ‘natural’ habitat. But the encounter has given Alice some cause to reflect on the resemblance between babies and pigs: ‘And she began thinking of other children she knew, who might as well be pigs’ (65). The kitchen scene is also where Alice first encounters the Cheshire Cat, whose enduring smile perhaps conveys the sense of its fixed nature or character, while doubtless for some people it is the dependent – or is it co-dependent – relationship with animals (and other non-human technologies) that generates a treasured relationship (see later). I  am reminded of visiting a rural English Bed and Breakfast in 2022 where I  was introduced to the pet pig, described as the owner’s ‘baby, therapy and sanity. Everyone should have a pig for their mental health’, she said. The rise of the category of ‘emotional support animal’ (ESA), especially in the USA, is surely indicative of a recent discourse around human–animal affective ties, whose reciprocity and asymmetry remain in question. Further, unlike, say, so-called ‘service animals’

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providing sensory compensation or enhancement to individuals and organisations (think of police and border agency uses of sniffer dogs as well as socalled ‘guide dogs’ or other ‘animal assistants’), ESAs are explicitly defined as providing emotional support to people who have diagnosed emotional difficulties. While this designation entitles ‘the handler’ to make certain demands for adjustment to accommodation and travel regulations, such certification processes are clearly predicated on state and medicalised discourses around affect and emotional needs. While affective engagement with animals is long-standing as well as current, in industrialising Britain, it seems it was the installation of human children as specifically developmental subjects that made them more interesting than mere livestock or a special pet, and so accorded them, at least in some places, at something approaching subject status. Yet doing this incurred some costs. Once the NSPCC had established itself, it severed links with the RSPCA: ‘Although animals and children began the century as companions, they ended it as adversaries’ (Flegel, 2009, p. 72). Gender and childhood: the girl (as)child

Cultural theorists of childhood have explored how the child came to stand for or personify Western subjectivity via a particular trajectory through European culture from the eighteenth century onwards (Rose, 1984; Castañeda, 2002), and indeed how it largely continues to function in this way. In Steedman’s (1995) influential account, contemporary Western notions of childhood originate in cultural-political developments: in the development of science, via the emergence of cell theory in biology; in the emergence of ideas of the unconscious that portrayed history as inscribed in and on the subject, such that cultural and species history was perceived as reproduced within individual child development. The potent combination of both nostalgia and essence attached to ‘the child’ marked the social transition to modernity and industrialisation. In sum, the child came to represent all that the pressures of modern life disallowed: unalienated, happy, playful – with ‘play’ portrayed as both benign and as a key term connecting the child with nature (see also Taylor, 2013; Grieshaber & MacArdle, 2010; Burman, 2012). The link with the exclusion of work via the valorisation of play has been deemed highly significant by childcare and educational theorists, in proscribing the knowledge and economic power, and potential political threat posed by young working people at home as well as abroad (Hendrick, 1990). Flegel argues that even child protectors (including the NSPCC) identified work or ‘commerce’ as a key cause of danger to children. As such, they ‘displace questions of social and economic imbalance with narratives of proper affective relationships between parents and children’ (Flegel, 2009, pp. 110–111)

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(see also Chapter 3). This is part of what maintains the stigmatisation of the majority of the world’s children who have worked and do work (with the limitations of the International Labour Organisation policies a case in point, Liebel, 2007). In its sentimental form, therefore, this notion of childhood was and is ideal-typical (and ideological) and corresponds to the lives of very few, if any, children (then or now). Its specific history elaborated through Rousseau, then the early European childhood educators (Froebel, Pestalozzi, Montessori and the like) (Singer, 1992; Taylor, 2013) and inscribed via the romantic poets relies on emerging and prevailing views of nature and ‘the natural’. Particular gendered relations of labour (including domestic labour and childcare) are also presumed. Steedman’s (1995) analysis traces continuities between high and low culture in the elaboration of this notion of childhood. Her thesis is that a particular story of childhood, originally written by Goethe but taken up in a range of forms across Europe – from literature to musical hall – becomes the site of projective identification for a new modernising subjectivity. The story was about the tribulations and implicit seductions of a child acrobat, who is gendered as feminine, but androgynously so, named Mignon (“sweet”, “cute”, but note not in the feminine form Mignonne). Indeed Flegel (2009) documents how child performers formed one of the major sites of political mobilisation over child concern, including the emerging NSPCC. As if to confirm Steedman’s thesis, Carroll/ Dodgson’s diary account of his first trip outside England in 1867 (which was to Russia) includes how on his return via Paris he writes of going to the ‘Opera Comique’ ‘. . . to hear “Mignon” – a very pretty spectacle, with charming music and singing – the heroine, Mdme. Galli-Marie, contributing a very large share to both departments of beauty’ (Carroll, 1965d, p. 1004). (This was around the time he might have been writing Through the Looking Glass, with its other animal–human transformations, which was published in 1871.) The Rev. Dodgson’s diary account documents his travels right through Europe (including France, Belgium and Germany on his way to Russia), including his first-ever visits to both a synagogue and a mosque. It also includes many descriptions of children and adults, interesting for its equivalent air of amusement and concern for both animals and children. For example, in Konigsberg: On the way to the station, we came across the grandest instance of the “Majesty of Justice” that I have ever witnessed – a little boy was being taken to a magistrate, or to prison (probably for picking a pocket). The achievement of this feat had been entrusted to two soldiers in full uniform, who were solemnly marching, on in front of the poor little creature, and

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one behind; with bayonets fixed, of course, to be ready to charge in case he should attempt an escape. (975) On the same page, he continues: At the hotel was a green parrot on a stand: we addressed it as “Pretty Poll”,  & [sic] it put its head on one side  & [sic] thought about it, but wouldn’t commit itself to any statement. The waiter came up to inform us of the reason for its silence – “Er spricht nicht English: er spricht nicht Deutsch”. It appeared that the unfortunate bird could speak nothing but Mexican! Not knowing a word of that language, we could only pity it. (ibid.) Significant to Dodgson’s wider philosophical concerns with the relations between language, logic and thinking, the parrot’s communicational limitation lies, then, in its lack of a language community, rather than any more speciesist exclusion. Home truths

The (girl)child continues to exert a particular evocative power and transitional status between human and animal. It is evident in presumptions that children should attend forest schools, are woodcraft folk, or even environmental stewards for our planetary future. The cultural chauvinisms and gendered exclusions of Romantic and colonial conceptions of childhood, that live on within contemporary environmentalist discourse (Taylor, 2013), originate much earlier. Sally Shuttleworth’s (2013) comprehensive volume on English representations of ‘the child’ in Victorian times documents the rise of child psychiatry, child psychology and its intimate and interwoven relationship with both popular press and fiction (including Dickens, James and more). Her account topicalises a specifically middle-class child – the key point being the innovation of according to such children the capacity (previously and only recently accorded – some, presumably middle-class, European – adults) to be human enough to be depressed, to lie or confabulate or to be abused. While there are big gulfs between Darwin’s theory of evolution and the claims made for it, there are some local links worth noting. For a time, Darwin himself seemed to subscribe to the theory of telegony, that is, that the offspring from a female animal is forever influenced by the characteristics of its first mate. This theory, first formulated by Lord Morton in an 1820 letter

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to the Royal Society, and favourably discussed by Darwin in an 1868 essay (Harrowitz, 1994, p. 2), was indicative of prevailing preoccupations: The notion of the potential influence of the first breeding on subsequent breedings was indeed alluring, as it provided a way to privilege the role of the male and to furnish a male prerogative of influencing other progeny not actually his own. (ibid.) It also became a means by which emerging social anxieties around paternity, racial mixing and miscegenation became expressed and rationalised. Appropriately enough, this mistaken theory (from which Darwin later dissociated himself) was generated from the efforts to breeding what was then a nearly (but now totally) extinct animal, the quagga – an animal resembling a zebra. The control of women, of the female, and of reproduction thus stands as a constitutive feature underlying colonial discourse, rather than merely a key reflection of it. Anne McClintock’s (1995, p. 45) influential analysis traces how the exclusions, hierarchies and pathologisations of the European empire were made natural by reference to models of the bourgeois family. This sanctioned the white man’s domination of his colonial subjects by virtue of the assumed legitimacy of his rule over his wife and children. As she notes: Projecting the family image onto national and imperial progress enabled what was often murderously violent change to be legitimatized as the progressive unfolding of natural decree. Imperial intervention could thus be configured as a linear, nonrevolutionary progression that naturally contained hierarchy within unity: paternal fathers ruling benignly over immature children. (45) Thus gender and generational relations, in the form of the bourgeois heteropatriarchal nuclear family, provided both a key rationale and model for colonial domination. As discussed further in Chapter 3, the shift in the conception of nature was from divine inspiration to the imperial presumption of natural order, as she continues: After the 1850s, the image of the natural, patriarchal family, in alliance with pseudoscientific social Darwinism, came to constitute the organizing trope for marshalling a bewildering array of cultures into a single, global, narrative ordered and managed by Europeans. In the process, the idea of divine nature was superseded by the idea of imperial nature, guaranteeing

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henceforth that the “universal” quintessence of Enlightenment individualism belongs only to propertied men of European descent. (McClintock, 1995, p. 45) Other, more local, connections turn out to be relevant too. Francis Galton is known as one of the founders of modern scientific psychology and of statistics. He was also a younger cousin of Charles Darwin, and as Harrowitz (1994, p. 5) notes, he was very impressed with Darwin’s discussion of what he (Galton) dubbed the ‘Quagga taint’. She argues, ‘. . . for Galton, it comes to represent the genealogical catastrophe of out-of-control breeding that lay in wait for the human race’ (6). Harrowitz continues: Interestingly, the relationship of Galton to Darwin is like that of the quagga to the Arabian mare: a haunting specter of the inevitable mutability and evolution of theory itself, of the manipulation of ideas in different hands, of a rather sad and highly problematic outcome that itself went through a series of complex narrative manoeuvres. (ibid.) Her account documents the uptake of such ideas, and from such beginnings, the new scientific racism arose. Indeed, Galton explicitly subscribed to eugenic ideas (as did also Truby King). The impact of evolutionary ideas and their societal circulation, discussed by Strathern (1992) and taken up in Chapter 3, has been seen as transforming notions of nature into something outside the social in a way that ultimately de-socialises the individual itself. For now, let us note how children, from being objects of little concern left to the care of women, emerged as major sites of inquiry, influenced by the popularisation of Darwin’s ideas from the mid-nineteenth century. Middleclass leisured men became very interested in documenting and studying their children’s development (Riley, 1983). Yet this is where the authorship and status of these child discovery stories demand re-evaluation. Shuttleworth discusses earlier diary studies of children’s development undertaken by women – indeed among those documented are those of Sophia Holland and Elizabeth Gaskell, both of whom were related to Darwin. Moreover, the child study movement shows significant indications of the gendered struggle to define children, childhood and its characteristics. While the association between children and femininity was such as to discourage Darwin from publishing his ‘Biographical sketch of an infant’ at the time of composing it in 1838–42 until much later in 1877, he finally submitted it only when the cultural tide had turned. Shuttleworth notes that he narrowly missed being the first to publish such a study, and it was rapidly succeeded by other papers on child language acquisition and comparative psychology being aired in the new journal Mind: a Quarterly Review of Psychology and

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Philosophy. Since men were the main authors in both literary and scientific arenas, it was not a question of mapping the struggle between these two fields. Rather, Shuttleworth’s argument is precisely to show how interwoven they are. For example, Lewes, a major player in the new child psychiatry and child study field, was the lover and life partner of George Eliot. Nevertheless, the new rash of periodicals on childcare and development saw a fierce debate about the role of women as mothers and their capacities to generate authoritative knowledge about their own children, and children in general, in which some women were vociferous. Children in the colonial gaze

But not all children were accorded such attention. Jennifer Beinart (1992) traces changes in perceptions of African children, as can be inferred from English photographic records over the colonial period. (The period she addresses is the late nineteenth century up to the mid-twentieth century). Here, explicit links were made between the child, the colonised and ‘nature’, with a hierarchy of importance reflected therein such that children were initially perceived as less interesting than animals: Servants (“boys”), pets and children were attributed common characteristics of playfulness and malleability, with outbursts of wilfulness; but the photographs show that they entered the European consciousness to very different degrees, with animals in the lead and the African child trailing far behind. (Beinart, 1992, p. 226) Shuttleworth offers an indicative example from an 1894 edition of the magazine Pall Mall of from an article by Richard Garner, entitled ‘A stroll with Aaron and my slave boy’. As she notes, ‘. . . the native is here quietly disregarded in order to celebrate the bond of man and monkey’ (260). Recapitulationist theory by this time was installed, with the child said to repeat the evolutionary process in its own developmental trajectory (ontogeny repeats phylogeny). What this meant was that a monkey companion trumped a ‘native’ human in this nineteenth-century Englishman’s African exploration. (For a brief intertextual moment we might note that Charles Dodgson (‘Mathematics Lecturer at Christ College, Oxford’) alias Lewis Carroll, wrote a letter to the same magazine (undated) complaining about the poor use of English and the need for a classical education; Carroll, 1965e.) From initially being (literally and graphically) peripheral, unnoticed and only included by accident (by virtue of children’s participation in everyday social and economic practices), Beinart charts how children became objects

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of scrutiny and intervention in the service of colonial and even post-colonial agendas: In the early period, while adults were dismissed as childlike, children were often or ignored altogether, or regarded as mere appendages of their mothers, as objects of amusement or a form of wildlife. Children’s widespread participation in adult social and economic life meant they appeared in the photographic record, but rather by accident than intention. Activities specific to childhood were cultural curios, if they were perceived at all. The ideal type of the African child, for many Europeans, was the ‘child of nature’, detached from a social context. (236) Competitions for ‘prize babies’ became a means of socialising African mothers to create British-style children: The prize baby represents the beginning of a process of Anglicisation, mainly carried out through education. The notion that African children could be transformed by education into something akin to the child, as the colonials knew it at home, broke across the boundaries between missionaries, government officials, and medical personnel; even across colonial national frontiers. (Beinart, 1992, p. 227) Scouting and guide clubs played a key role in this project, as she evocatively points out: ‘the white uniform of one girl appears to radiate light from the centre of the photograph – a visually striking expression of colonial “enlightenment” ’ (ibid., 230). These organisations, she argues, not only worked to install European cultural superiority in the name of scientific health and especially education. They also created an African citizenry who would not only understand the colonisers but, via the dynamic of emulation installed, would also guarantee markets for British exports. From the 1920s, the message of reaching children through the mothers took a new turn as the ‘Whitened child’ was targeted, in the name of child-saving, as a consumer of Western medicine and Western products in general (236). Significantly, now child health rather than education was foregrounded, communicating broader messages of social and economic development, since children were recognised as economic and cultural ‘go-betweens’ in the transition from colony to postcolony (Beinart, 1992, p. 237). Child saving

Chapter  3 evaluates in more detail the mixed motivations underlying care and concern – both for children and for animals – discussing both historical

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and recent examples. Here, in this chapter, we might note that critical development theorists and critics of aid have also highlighted the mixed motives (as well as effects) of child-saving as part of the discourse of infantilisation and underdevelopment. In particular, critiques point out how the ‘great chain of being’ from ‘dumb animals’ to ‘unfinished humans’ works to confirm the finished competence of the ‘helper’ (Gronemeyer, 1993). Dodgson/Carroll also topicalised some dilemmas in child-saving: what kind of responsibilities did Alice take upon herself in her rush to save the child? Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now what am I to do with this creature, when I get it home?”, when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt it would be quite absurd to carry it any further. So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think”. (ibid., 64–5) So, Alice was relieved to see that the child-who-became-a-pig could ‘trot away’. That is, it was mobile, independent and not in need of, in fact, significantly, it would be quite absurd to provide, the kind of care as that (now seen as) required in relation to a human baby. Can we see Alice as foreshadowing the figure of the NSPCC inspector that, as Flegel (2009) discusses, operates at the borders of and between domestic and public space, between home and the state? Notwithstanding some earlier variation (Flegel notes regional contestations between the earlier, Liverpool, organisation and the policies finally adopted from the London one), NSPCC official narrative around child abuse was oriented to show that abuse could happen in more, as well as less, affluent homes (as in the aristocratic example of the Duchess, perhaps). In doing this, child maltreatment was rendered a question of failure of feeling rather than of material conditions. The attention to the emotional qualities of the child and childcare worked to occlude environmental deprivations and marked a key moment in the rise of psychologisation as a mode of disciplinary regulation of parents and families. The NSPCC’s construction of cruelty to children as a classless crime, one connected to individual character rather than social environment, demonstrates the influence of novelistic narratives in which child suffering is the result of crimes of feeling, of a failure to love, a failure to protect on the part of the guardian . . . where child abuse is a problem within the home, the NSPCC, as we shall see, often locates the root cause for this abuse in

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the abusive parents’ failure to feel proper emotion towards their children, rather than in the family’s suffering or necessity. (Flegel, 2009, p. 17) Such accounts indicate how discourses of early intervention characterising current, twenty-first century, child-focused and antipoverty initiatives not only have a long history but also have their origins in what was explicitly fictional as many as factual (or scientific) representations of childhood (and Shuttleworth, 2013, also amply documents their mutual relations). Not only does the focus on emotions work to occlude class, and specifically class-associated deprivations, such that abuse comes to arise from insensitivity or bad character rather than socio-economic pressures. It also involved the application of a reverse colonial narrative, invoking discourses of civilisation, that treated the abusive working class (usually focusing on men) as ‘The English savage’, while adults who exploited children were portrayed as ‘cannibals’, lacking European civilisation. Flegel provides a detailed discussion of ‘The child of the English savage’, an essay published in 1886 by key NSPCC figures Cardinal Manning and Benjamin Waugh, highlighting how racialisation came into play via equations made between children and wild animals. Indeed, not all children were seen as meriting the indulgence of Victorian sentiment. This period may well have seen the renegotiation of discourses of original innocence, replacing original sin with ideas of rehabilitation. But these remained deeply classed and also colonial – as indicated by the widespread use of the term ‘street Arab’, for example, to describe boys on British city streets, although – while certainly racialised – its original reference was to horses. As she notes: The term “street Arab”, though undoubtedly racial in its implications, originally referred to the breed of horse. Other phrases from the nineteenth century, such as “ownerless dogs”, and “predatory hordes” also clearly signify the connection between children and wild animals. (Flegel, 52–3) Repetitions or reformulations: postcolonial possibilities

I will now attempt to classify what (if any) political possibilities arise through prevailing repetitions of animal–human comparisons. There is no shortage of accounts reiterating the same old story of animals as projections or extensions of the Eurocentric masculinist gaze, reiterated, if also reflexively, by Derrida in his discussions of the ethics of caring about his cat, rather than all cats, as perhaps an example of what he discusses as carno-phallogocentrism (Derrida, 2008).

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First, there is classical identification, as indicated by how in January 2013 the novelist VS Naipaul mourned the death of his animal companion, the cat Augustus, such that he could not bear to be in his house without ‘his soulmate’ because: ‘He was the sum of my experiences. He had taken on my outlook, my way of living’. (The Week, 12 January 2013, 10). This recalls Freud’s comments, that accompany his discussion of narcissism via the trope of ‘His Majesty the Baby’ (taken up in Chapter  7), where he suggests the baby functions as a projection or extension of the adult’s sense of themselves. He writes: The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his selfcontainment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey. (Freud, 1914/1957, p. 89) Such supposed ‘charm’ is, of course, a projection of adult desires to be self-sufficient and independent of others. On the other hand, dogs populate much metaphorical discourse signifying loyalty and fidelity – as in the mid-2010s Internet provider advertisement slogan ‘STAY near your texts’ accompanying the image of a dog obediently sitting. This ironises human technological dependencies even as it plays with the shifts of subjectivity between humans, animals and machines. The next chapter takes up these themes in relation to child and animal loving, through a discussion of the online market for chimp-baby dolls, which are nearly all, interestingly, gendered as female. Here, while appearing in some ways to be the reverse of the fragility of narcissism, this is also extended: the babymonkey hybrid seems to work to combine or even intensify the sentiment surrounding both, inciting a mode of affective engagement whose ersatz emulation suggests much about the desires fulfilled by both children and animals, especially baby ones: that is, touch and ownership, a sense of power/dependency and, above all, relationship. A second position appears to privilege animal welfare over people, as in, for example, the 2008 mass online campaign to extradite a puppy to the US when a (perhaps significantly, female-identified) soldier’s tour of Iraq was completed: More than 10,000 people have signed an online petition urging the US army to let an Iraqi puppy go home with a soldier who fears that Ratchet could be killed if left behind. “I just want my puppy home”, Sgt Gwen Beberg, 28, wrote when she was separated from the dog after a transfer. Yesterday, a programme coordinator for Operation Baghdad Pups, run by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International, left for

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the Middle East to try to get the puppy to America. Last week, Beberg’s congressman, the Minnesota Democrat, Keith Ellison, urged the army to review the case. (‘Thousands sign petition to rescue puppy from Iraq’, The Guardian, 15 October, 21). That the transnational and high-level concern mobilised by a single dog was not an isolated incident is underscored by subsequent reports that in 2021 the then British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, personally approved the evacuation of animals over offering safe havens to Afghanis fleeing from Afghanistan as the United States and British occupying/‘peace-keeping’ forces left (Harrison  & Gentleman, 2022). Noting this is not to deride the work of organisations concerned with global animal rescue (such as War Paws https:// warpaws.org/the-shelter-in-iraq/). Yet, still, the inception of such organisations as ‘Operation Baghdad Pups: worldwide’ (https://www.spcai.org/ourwork/operation-baghdad-pups-worldwide) from major global theatres of war, and the ways such initiatives can be reported to confirm the benevolence of the occupiers, warrants reflection. To take another example, Moosavi (2021) has asked ‘whether UK universities care about hedgehogs more than they care about people of colour?’ (74). While he characterises this as an ‘absurd’ question (ibid.), he nevertheless notes how UK universities have been documented to have had ‘much greater engagement with the Hedgehog Friendly Campus initiative than the Race Equality Charter’ (ibid.) while addressing gender inequalities (via the Athena Swan accreditation initiatives) have also attracted much more engagement than those concerned with challenging racism. Again, institutional and organisational hierarchies are set up between child and animals, and between challenging racialised and gendered inequalities in ways that belie their complex intersections. If the reference to hedgehog welfare is put forward playfully, still I note that there is a (volunteer-run) hedgehog hospital not far from where I live which is open 24 hours (https://en-gb.facebook.com/withingtonhedgehog/), whereas the closest Accident and Emergency Hospital Department is much further away, owing to Government cuts and closures. Third is how anthropomorphised representations of animals are used to convey meanings about humans. An example here might be the British attention to the craze for pictures of dogs in tights on Chinese websites some years ago, where prurient orientalism is intensified and apparently legitimated via animal concern. Chinese dog owners have sparked a new trend – for dressing man’s best friend in pantyhose. The craze began on the Chinese social media site Weibo, when a handful of users posted pictures of their dogs wearing tights [pictured]. Now, animal rights groups have complained that the

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“sexy” styling of the photos is inappropriate, and that wearing tights is likely to be “uncomfortable” for a dog. (The Week, 20 April 2013, 14) Such images not only highlight the sexualisation of pets that mobilises and extends the attribution to animals of specifically gendered dynamics of objectification and de-humanisation. They also indicate not only the rising disposable incomes of a Chinese middle class, and its global presence, but also the British prurient interest and long-standing mode of evaluating others by their relationships with animals. A specific twist on this general theme is how racialisation is enacted via species-specific animal depictions. This can be seen in the reception and transformation of fables and children’s stories. To take a notable example, in Black Skin White Masks (Fanon, 1952/1970), Frantz Fanon writes about the Br’er Rabbit stories, which were based on African American folktales (with similar themes also occurring in Native American cultures) but recorded, oriented to a Southern US white audience and published by Joel Chandler Harris in the late nineteenth century. British (and likely other Anglophone) children have also encountered these stories via their retelling by the prolific children’s author Enid Blyton (who published eight Br’er Rabbit books, only one less than Harris himself, as well as copious other noxious children’s fodder, including the notorious Noddy stories, featuring the offensive caricatured Black figure, the Gollywog), as well as through Disney film versions. The motif of the trickster rabbit outwitting humans resonates with themes of African American strategies of survival under conditions of slavery and oppression. As a segue to the hedgehog issue discussed earlier, lovers of Beatrix Potter’s tales (images from which are ubiquitous on child-focused crockery and other domestic merchandise), of course include not only Mrs Tiggiwinkle but also Peter Rabbit, whose formulation is said to have been influenced by Harris’ Br’er Rabbit stories. Most accounts of Harris emphasise his identification with the African American slaves from whom he heard these stories on his employer’s plantation, and in whose subordinate status he found some echo of his own marginalisation (as an illegitimate child who was also bullied for being red-headed). It is thought that Fanon encountered the Br’er Rabbit stories through French versions circulating in his native Antilles (Richards, 2011). Fanon relies for his discussion on a 1949 analysis of Harris and the Br’er Rabbit stories by Bernard Wolfe (Wolfe, 1949), quoting extensively from this. Ventriloquising Wolfe, Fanon instead offers an excoriating account of Harris’ racism as a symptom of his ‘psychopathy’, and by extension the wider dynamics of displaced masochism and homoeroticism into sadism, sexual envy and anxiety constituted by racism. This deepens the critique of the more general equation of Black peoples and/as animals, even as these stories also

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offered a space for covert expression of fantasies of revenge and aggression on the part of African Americans. (It should be noted that Fanon’s discussion occurs in the chapter of Black Skin White Masks titled ‘The Negro and Psychopathology’.) But, even if the sentiments expressed are not quite as extreme, online accounts note that Toni Morrison and Alice Walker distanced themselves from the positive reception of Harris’ supposed popularisation of African American folktales, portraying him as having appropriated these for his own purposes. The methodological point made by Richards (2011), of the importance of attending to the reformulations from oral to print versions of such stories, becomes politically more salient in relation to the radical narratives Fanon elaborates from such texts, the neglect of which she suggests ‘threatens to turn Fanon studies into an off-shore enterprise for manufacturing “multi-culturalism” at minimal social or psychic cost to the status quo’ (132). Fourth is the position that tries to draw links between child and animal concerns. The (northern England town of) Bolton is home to an organisation ‘Paws for kids’ (www.pawsforkids.org.uk), which does not treat cruelty to animals as a proxy for cruelty to children. Nor does it presume that violence against either women or children necessarily gives rise to violence against pets (although clearly there are associations and the organisation now works under the name Endeavour and under the rubric of domestic abuse and violence support services https://www.endeavourproject.org.uk/). This kind of framework is indicative of other organisations that offer support to domesticated animals as a means of supporting victims of intimate partner violence to leave violent relationships. The organisational name mobilises the assonance between ‘paws’ and ‘pause’ (taken up also by ‘War Paws’ cited earlier). It offers fostering or temporary accommodation for animals belonging to children and families who are in transition and seeking refuge from violence. Here, links between domestic violence and children’s safety and animal welfare are set in play, but without one being equated to the other directly. Interestingly, like the NSPCC, in its publicity Paws for Kids does not address more complicated ways in which animals may figure in violence against women and children, such as where the abused child, or woman even, might vent their pain or anger by harming the animal. The narrative (perhaps unsurprisingly since the website announces it was set up by a group of women) remains one of (animal) rescue and reunion (between pets and their human companions). Just as women sometimes stay in violent relationships for their children, the organisation claims, so they may do so for animals. Hence, just as some children do not meet social criteria for being deserving victims, through their display of knowledge or actions – and Flegel (2009) notes that such children as ‘juvenile delinquents’ were considered in need of punishment rather than rescue by the NSPCC – these are ambiguous

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representations of animal–human relations, where the role of animals, for example as tools of abuse, is not recognised. the delinquent child disrupts the binary opposition between child and adult, between child independence and child dependence, and between the child as salvageable and the child as lost . . . the figure of the juvenile delinquent in nineteenth-century discourse – and in current attacks upon separate punishments for child criminals – reminds us that it is not, perhaps, the child itself that Victorian child-savers, or even our own culture, wants to save, but rather than constructed figure of the ideal victim – helpless, innocent, malleable, and eminently “worthy” of intervention. When the child fails to be that figure, child protection itself often proves insufficient to account for or save that child. (Flegel, 148) Relations of ‘as’ or ‘as if’: identification or misrecognition?

Elsewhere I have interrogated the analytical ambiguities of claims made connecting the notion of child to a range of entities and practices via the preposition ‘as’ (Burman, 2013). Here, I have tried to explore some consequences of the many ways in which gendered, generational, human–animal and colonial relations have been connected (see also Bull, 2011; Griffiths, 2002). These have included the following: woman as child; child as animal, or less than an animal, more than animal, more and less than (modern) human; child as colonised; colonised people positioned as children – deficient, in need of proper education and training; child as coloniser (as a means through which colonial rule was installed and maintained); child as mediator of colonisation; and animal as (sometimes) child. A key dynamic is how women have been regulated through their required, perceived, and felt relationships with children, even as colonial rule was justified by the supposedly natural rule of men over women and children in the home. Nevertheless, there are omissions and exclusions within those accounts focusing on gender relations too. While McClintock (1995) analyses the role of bourgeois familialism as a rationale for colonial domination, she says little about how children, and women’s relations with children, functioned as sites for either colonial imposition or its resistance, for example. Indeed, she does not mention the role of children (except insofar as they are presumed to occupy women’s labour, and women’s similar status as property). Similarly, as we will see in Chapter 3, Marilyn Strathern’s (1992) focus is on the specialness of the child which – through rather a tenuous analysis of the anthropological canon – she traces as being modelled on that of pets. It is on this basis she suggests that the discourse of kinship this produced generated the very individual that could make the social character of its construction disappear. While these feminist accounts are concerned with the meanings

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of children and reproduction for adults, then, neither Strathern nor McClintock address the intersecting character of the relationship between adults and children, other than to discuss the implications for women via the social meanings accorded by them of their reproductive status in relation to children. Similarly, Flegel (2009, p. 47) draws on Penny Brown’s (1993) analysis of the emergence of literary representations of the child as self (claiming this as highlighting a ‘potent literary symbol of the subjective exploration of the self, of the writer’s sense of uncertainty and vulnerability, and of simplicity, innocence and feeling in the face of an increasingly dehumanised industrial age’, quoted on 47). However, she offers no comment about how the genre of the novel historically arose as a particularly gendered form (cf. Mitchell, 1984). It is indeed relevant to note how religiously sanctioned heteropatriarchal models of the family were mobilised in child-saving discourse through analogy with the Christian Holy Family. Manning and Waugh’s ‘The child of the English savage’ (1886) published in Contemporary View discussed it thus: The exemplary familial relationship here is the Holy Family, and through it, the family itself is constructed as holy. The home is “sanctified” and the family is the earthly sign of God’s consanguinity to humanity. . . . Moreover, it is the child who is most like God, and who best represents this divine-human relationship. (quoted in Flegel, 2009, p. 59) Flegel further hints that such familialism may even have entered into the increasing tensions and separation between the NSPCC and its supportive predecessor the RSPCA, quoting from articles in the NSPCC publication The Child’s Guardian in 1887 where ‘The choice of these parents to care for animals before their children is a sign of their savagery, of their failure to respect and protect the sanctified space of the home’ (63). Thus, both historically, and currently, big political and analytical opportunities appear to being missed in failing to attend to these gendered, generational and cross-species intersections, with significant consequences. Flegel (2009, p.  72) suggests ‘by severing the child from the animal, the NSPCC failed to recognise the ways in which narratives of child-animal suffering might help to illuminate problems of power, cruelty and domination’. Equally, what can be seen is how easy it is to oversimplify or inadvertently reproduce the abstraction incipiently surrounding children, in discussions of the ‘colonisation of childhood’ that take elide generational with colonial oppression. For example, Cannella and Viruru’s (2004) in their otherwise prescient treatment, say: The orient was a European invention comprised of exotic beings and landscapes. Those who are younger have been constructed through a similar

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lens, labeled “exotic” in their innocence, weakness, immaturity, lack of responsibility and cuteness. (110) On the other hand, making such parallels can have direct political effects on the actors concerned. So Vron Ware (1989) suggests that British women’s mobilisation in support of the abolition of slavery in part galvanised them to build the campaign for women’s suffrage. Alongside evaluating the basis on which such parallels are made, it is important to attend to what resists or is held back from such mappings rather than simply to treat these as substitutions; or, still worse, to attempt to find a single beginning. Deleuze’s (1998, p. 63) comment is relevant here: ‘It is not a matter of searching for an origin but of evaluating displacements’ (emphasis original). A  transposition moves something from one place to another; it does not merge into or replace what it is put on as it replaces it. To say children are colonised can too simplistically eclipse both the particularity of the specific form of colonial domination and the specificity of the oppression of children. This point holds even though there are clear parallels (around paternalism, patriarchy, the coercion of benevolent help and so on) to be made. The fact that children grow up and that childhood is recognised as a temporary condition, deeply structures how children are treated. Indeed, this often warrants their further exploitation (as low-paid temporary workers positioned as ‘learning the job’, for example, Morice, 2000). Discourses of improvement, education and socialisation have been applied to the colonised by analogy with childhood, as well as the reverse: the socialisation and education of children have functioned as a tool of colonisation. Territorial nostalgias, cosmic homes

In this chapter, I have focused primarily on the confluences and vicissitudes and contestations between animal, child and human relations. The recent surge of interest from childhood and educational studies on these relations (e.g. Taylor  & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019) – prompted in part by the same political, eco-sensitive questions that also motivate my inquiry – makes it easy to forget how many discussions of animals and humans, even those constellated around discussions of the posthuman or Anthropocene, have had little to say about children and childhood (e.g. Taylor & Signal, 2011). Yet beyond this, contemporary posthuman discourse, via the trope of ‘becoming’ – whether ‘becoming-woman’, ‘becoming-animal, -vegetable, or -mineral’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 272) or all of these – threatens to install a dynamic of generalisation. It matters which animals and how – as well as if – we ‘become’ them. Haraway warns against how ‘human/

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posthuman is much too easily appropriated by the blissed-out, “Let’s all be posthumanists and find our next teleological stage in some kind of transhumanist techno-enhancement” ’ (Gane & Haraway, 2006, p. 140) that risks importing a ‘blissed out’ (ibid.) technophilia. Similar problems attend the abstraction incipient within dominant discourses of childhood that occlude sociohistorical conditions of inequality, as well as contingent geopolitical contexts. Instead, the kind of relations being asserted demand interrogation: co-­existence, continuity, identity, transition, transformation or even (as with Alice’s baby pig) metamorphosis. Moreover, these may not be the only possibilities. Perhaps there are mere juxtapositions or alignments, Strathern’s (1992) ‘partial connections’, instead of the parables, proxies, prostheses, hybrids, blends and surrogates – that Haraway (2003) calls alibis – literalised by, and so dissipating the metaphorical relation with, the guinea pig (see also Haraway, 1997). As Haraway quips, ‘we need to pay attention to the thick continuities as a kind of prophylactic against the euphorics of speed as a cultural aesthetic or as a cultural-theoretical aesthetic’ (Gane & Haraway, op cit., 155). A  Child as method approach highlights the need to attend to the physical specificities of, and material conditions for, symbolic representations. This is needed to be able to trace through how such conditions articulate, inscribe or otherwise work and rework more general constellations of semiotic–material power relations, while representations of child– animal relations – no less than of human–animal metamorphoses – may be useful tools to think through contested histories and relationships, as well as possible futures. It is worth recalling, as Mel Chen (2012) discusses, how the term ‘animacy’ (and its cognate animation) lacks a specific definition. ‘Animacy’ evokes activity, even agency (as in being or becoming animate), but its inclusions and exclusions have always resisted specification. It might extend to include the supposedly non-sentient, animal or plant life, as well as the vexed questions of the status of sentience and corresponding rights that might be accorded (or withheld) from technological systems. These – and related political questions – have occupied many popular and academic texts (utopian and dystopian, as well as scientific) and comprise a good idea of the interest in the posthuman. Animacy, as Chen points out, references life, specifically breathing, and such associations necessarily bring to the fore colonial and racialised oppression epitomised by the murder in 2020 of George Floyd, the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the revival of interest in Fanon’s writings on the embodied, psychoaffective impacts of colonisation. But, in addition, ‘animacy’ also has connections with ‘animus’ – soul, mind or dispositional quality (usually of a hostile nature, as in animosity) (see Chen, 2012, p. 5). While Chen takes up these ambivalences and multivalences to interrogate biopolitics and forms of

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racialisation, drawing on queer theory and varieties of new materialist perspectives, here I have extended this politicised appreciation of semantic connection to focus in particular on the child–animal relation. Notwithstanding all the affinities identified, what has emerged is how the child–animal relation is typically hierarchical, while it also consolidates other (gendered, classed and racialised) hierarchies. We will have to look elsewhere to find solidarities, even as it is useful to attend to how specific moments of alignment and alliance have historically occurred. I end this chapter with a segue to the next. This is the reminder that the colonial and post-colonial are not only temporal (as in hierarchical models of developmental), but they also iterate modes of affective relations that figure connection and belonging via nation and land (see also Millei, 2019; Millei & Imre, 2016). This point highlights how the body politic of national belonging is a potently gendered field via its familial, intergenerational affective associations. As Lesnik-Oberstein (1998, p. 7) succinctly put it the very idea of childhood itself is crucially implicated in the structures of feeling that define the bourgeois nuclear family, and which prioritize emotions as a structuring and motivating force for both public and private life in contemporary capitalism. Dodgson concludes his account of his first trip outside Britain (which lasted some months) with a description that fuses domestic, (probably) maternalist (or anyway parental) imagery with a sense of cosmic connection and timeless presence on which colonial superiority has always relied; a fusion of home aligned with nation that is encapsulated by and literally ends with ‘the white cliffs of old England’ as a parental embrace. the lights of Dover, as they slowly broadened on the horizon, as if the old land were opening its arms to receive its homeward-bound children – till they finally stood out clear and bold as the two light-houses on the cliff – till that which had long been merely a glimmering line on the dark water, like a reflection of the Milky Way, took form  & [sic] substance as the lights of the shoreward houses – till the faint white line behind them, that looked at first like a mist creeping along the horizon was visible at last in the grey twilight as the white cliffs of old England. (1965c, p. 1005) Like a reflection of the ‘Milky Way’, the timeless connection asserted to the ‘old land’ renders the sighting of the British coast (the white cliffs of Dover) as a faithful and attentive parent welcoming the return of its children. Home and land thus combine and are affectively endowed with qualities conflating – via

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reference both to scale and protective features – the care of a g­ enerational and transgenerational national-familial allegiance. References Becker, F. (2001). The links between child abuse and animal abuse. NSPCC Briefings. Retrieved August  8, 2023, from http://www.norodeo.org/info/LinksViolen ceNSPCC.pdf Beinart, J. (1992). Darkly through a lens: Changing perceptions of the African child in sickness and health, 1900–1945. In R. Cooter (Ed.), In the name of the child: Health and welfare (pp. 220–243). Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity. Brown, P. (1993). The captured world: The child and childhood in nineteenth century women’s writing. Harvester. Bruhm, S., & Hurley, N. (Eds.). (2004). Curioser: On the queerness of children. University of Minnesota Press. Bull, J. (2011). Animal movements-moving animals: Essays on direction, velocity and agency in humanimal encounters. Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University. Bunge, M. (Ed.). (2011). Children, adults, and shared responsibilities: Jewish, Christian and Muslim perspectives. Cambridge University Press. Burman, E. (2012). Deconstructing neoliberal childhood: Towards a feminist antipsychological approach. Childhood: A  Global Journal of Child Research, 19(4), 423–438. Burman, E. (2013). Conceptual resources for questioning child as educator. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(3), 229–243. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11217-012-9353-0 Cannella, G., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization. RoutledgeFalmer. Carroll, L. (1965a). Alice’s adventures in wonderland. In L. Carroll (Ed.), The works of Lewis Carroll (pp. 19–110). Hamlyn. Carroll, L. (1965b). Preface to Sylvie and Bruno. In L. Carroll (Ed.), The works of Lewis Carrol. (pp. 379–385). Hamlyn. Carroll, L. (1965c). Resident women students. In L. Carroll (Ed.), The works of Lewis Carroll (pp. 959–961). Hamlyn. Carroll, L. (1965d). Journal of a tour in Russia in 1867. In L. Carroll (Ed.), The works of Lewis Carroll (pp. 967–1005). Hamlyn. Carroll, L. (1965e). Natural science at Oxford. To the editor of Pall Mall. In L. Carroll (Ed.), The works of Lewis Carroll. (pp. 962–964). Hamlyn. Castañeda, C. (2002). Figurations: Child, bodies, worlds. Duke University Press. Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. (1998). Essays critical and clinical (D. W. Smith & M. A. Greco, Trans.). Verso. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing. Derrida, J. (2008). The animal that therefore I am. Fordham University Press. Evans, E.P. (1906). The criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals. Faber & Faber.

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Fanon, F. (1952/1970). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Paladin. Flegel, M. (2009). Conceptualizing cruelty to children in nineteenth-century England: Literature, representation and the NSPCC. Ashgate. Foucault, M. (2001). Le monde est un grand aisle. In M. Foucault (Ed.), Dits et Ecrits (pp. 1301–1302). Gallimard. Freud, S. (1914/1957). On narcissism: An introduction. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the history of the psycho-analytic movement, papers on metapsychology and other works (pp. 67–102). (Original work published 1914). Hogarth Press. Gane, N.,  & Haraway, D. (2006). When we have never been human, what is to be done? Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture  & Society, 23(7–8), 135–158. Grieshaber, S., & MacArdle, F. (2010). The trouble with play. Open University Press. Griffiths, J. (2002). Almost human: Indeterminate children and dogs in ‘Flush’ and ‘The Sound and the Fury’. The Yearbook of English Studies, 163–176. Gronemeyer, M. (1993). Helping. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power (pp. 53–69). Zed. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second _Milllenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse: Feminism and technoscience. Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press. Harrison, E.,  & Gentleman, A. (2022). ‘It’s a joke’: Left-behind Afghans despair at dog-rescue revelations. Retrieved September  5, 2022, from https://www.the guardian.com/world/2022/jan/26/its-a-joke-left-behind-afghans-despair-at-dogrescue-revelations Harrowitz, N. (1994). Anti-semitism, misogyny  & the logic of cultural difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao. University of Nebraska Press. Hendrick, H. (1990). Constructions and reconstructions of British childhood: An interpretive survey, 1800 to the present day. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood (pp. 35–59). Falmer. Hofstadter, D. (1980). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid. A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Penguin. Kincaid, J. (1992). Child-loving: The erotic child and Victorian culture. Routledge. Lancelyn Green, R. (1965). Introduction. In The works of Lewis Carroll (pp. 11–18). Hamlyn. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1998). Childhood and textuality: Culture, history, literature. In K. Lesnik-Oberstein (Ed.), Children in culture: Approaches to childhood (pp. 1–28). Palgrave Macmillan. Liebel, M. (2007). Opinion, dialogue, review: The new ILO report on child labour: A success story, or the ILO still at a loss? Childhood, 14(2), 279–284. Massey, I. (1976). The gaping pig: Literature and metamorphosis. University of California Press. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. Routledge. Millei, Z. (2019). Pedagogy of nation: A concept and method to research nationalism in young children’s institutional lives. Childhood, 26(1), 83–97. Millei, Z., & Imre, R. (Eds.). (2016). Childhood and nation: Interdisciplinary engagements. Palgrave.

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Mitchell, J. (1984). Women: The longest revolution: Essays on feminism, literature and psychoanalysis. Penguin. Moosavi, L. (2021). Do UK universities care about hedgehogs more than people of colour? Societies, 11(3), 74. Morice, A. (2000). Paternal domination: The typical relationship conditioning the exploitation of children. In B. Schlemmer (Ed.), The exploited child (pp.  195– 213). Zed. Newson, E., & Newson, J. (1973). Cultural aspects of child-rearing in the Englishspeaking world. In M. Richards (Ed.), The integration of the child into a social world (pp. 52–82). Cambridge University Press. Patterson-Kane, E., & Piper, H. (2009). Animal abuse as a sentinel for human violence: A critique. Journal of Social Issues, 65(3), 589–614. Richards, P. (2011). Fanon as reader of African American folklore. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 4(7), 126–133. Riley, D. (1983). War in the nursery: Theories of mother and child. Virago. Rose, J. (1984). The case of peter pan or the impossibility of children’s fiction. Macmillan. Schiff Berman, P. (1994). Rats, pigs and statues on trial: The creation of cultural narratives in the prosecution of animals and inanimate objects. NYU Review, 69, 288–326. Shuttleworth, S. (2013). The mind of the child: Child development in literature, science and medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford University Press. Singer, E. (1992). Child-care and the psychology of development. Routledge. Steedman, C. (1995). Strange dislocations: Childhood and the idea of human interiority 1780–1939. Virago. Strathern, M. (1992). After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Routledge. Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2019). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. Routledge. Taylor, N., & Signal, T. (Eds.). (2011). Theorizing animals: Re-thinking humanimal relations. Brill. Ware, V. (1989). Beyond the pale: White women, racism and history. Verso. West, S. (2007). Interludes: A dangerous indulgence. Retrieved September 5, 2022, from http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2007/01/a_dangerous_ind_1.php Wolfe, B. (1949, Mai). L’Oncle Rémus et son lapin (R. Guyonnet, Trans.). Les temps modernes, 910.

3 SENTIMENT Gendered, generational and animal affectivities

Child as method names an analytical perspective that attends to and interrogates the position of children and childhood as a key diagnostic axis of, as well as a reflection of, wider geopolitical dynamics. As was seen in Chapter 2, the topic of children and animals sits at the confluence of recent feminist and anticolonial debates, as well as informed by so-called new materialist and posthuman approaches (the status of which are evaluated in Part III). One feature shared by these approaches is that they challenge or even undo the Eurocentric, logocentric binary between humans and animals, even as they highlight the ambiguous position occupied by the child in this. In this chapter, I focus on the question of affect, or emotion. For current purposes, I  will treat the notions of affect and emotion together, notwithstanding how in some contexts these are treated as distinct. I acknowledge that emotion (or passion) has been counterposed to reason as one of the key binaries structuring modern Eurocentrism (along with, and associated with female–male, black–white) and that some people have been drawn to affect theory as a means of avoiding invidious oppositions (Clough, 2008). My more general, or perhaps generous, reading of the overlap (rather than competition) between these terms arises not least to do with a reluctance to endorse some of the assumptions such discussions make about the presumed separation of the psychic and the bodily, as well as domains of the discursive and pre- or non-discursive within the prevailing theoretical discussion, a claim I  do not find persuasive, at least in relation to the particular resources I will be concerned with here. I therefore combine this discussion of emotion and affect with what I am calling here ‘sentiment’, understood as a socially structured affective orientation, after Raymond Williams’ (1977) notion of ‘structures of feeling’. Williams defines such structures of feeling as DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-5

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‘characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships’ (132), which are understood in terms of ‘a “structure”: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension’ (ibid.). I mobilise this notion of ‘sentiment’ also with a critical and psychodynamic inflection to better interrogate its encultured but also embodied and lived features. I  hope by this to add something to existing discussions of human–animal, adult–child, coloniser–colonised relationships, which have been a focus of much feminist discussion, as well as to interrogate and undo gendered and generational orders. As the previous chapters have indicated, connecting animal and childhood studies poses methodological challenges, as well as mobilising competing and contrasting conceptual frameworks. My approach here moves between past and present examples, precisely to estrange assumed continuities or legacies. Clearly, this is a very partial affair, even as partialities and affairs are the stuff of what we do with animals, as well as sometimes with children as well as adults, and of comparisons in general (Stengers, 2011; Haraway, 2020). As I will discuss, this connects intimately with the colonial field, as well as inflecting prevailing discourses of protection, deprivation, and also the seduction and exploitation of women and children (and some men too). Attention to these matters disturbs the assumed common sense or even the ‘second nature’ of both this history and its current practice. Just as Foucault (1981) questioned the myth of the repressive Victorians, so we may end up noticing our contemporary era’s investments, incitements and foreclosures – not only around animals, children, women and the postcolony but also around the conceptualisation of ‘nature’ itself. Child as method is both informed by and speaks to these debates, in terms of promoting the posing of questions around the how and why of the alignment of child with nature, thereby troubling or bringing up for critical scrutiny the assumptions informing both. It speaks to these questions by also highlighting the importance of attending to the interconnectedness of (culturally sanctioned as well as prohibited) passion with (prevailing modes of) reason, as both topic and method. In this chapter, I take up Strathern’s (1992) discussion of the construction of ‘nature’ as related to articulations of relationship and feeling: The model of kinship as the social construction of natural facts is the outcome, then, of various shifts not just in the meanings of society and of structure but of the facticity of nature and the naturalness of facts. I have suggested that “nature” itself provided a model for the very domaining (or professionalising) of concepts themselves. It in turn was naturalised in the image of the life of organisms and became understood as biology. Yet there was always more to the matching between kinship and nature than the perception of biological affinity between mammalian forms of nurture or the mechanics of sexual reproduction. Kinship in the modern, pluralist

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epoch preserved the idea of variable genetic heritage and the fruitful production of new, vigorous individuals. (Strathern, 1992, p. 151) This chapter focuses on and elaborates on these claims. On the need for specificity

While mobilised in previous chapters, a methodological precept, I want to engage and reflect on in this chapter is that of specificity. One speaks from a particular position but aims to speak to, or address, general questions. The binary between the particular and universal can sometimes be difficult to navigate. The interpreter of cultural systems, Roland Barthes, insisted that the task of analysis is ‘. . . not to inventorize the connotators but to understand that in the total image they constitute discontinuous or better still scattered traits’ (1977, p. 50). Further, as Peter Galison (1997) put it: ‘meanings don’t travel all at once in great conceptual schemes, but rather hesitantly, partially, and nonetheless efficaciously, perhaps’ (505). It is these partialities and hesitant moves that I want to engage here. Like other critical theorists, critical psychologists and educationalists have long looked to history and anthropology for resources to destabilise dominant current arrangements, to ‘de-naturalise’ the slippage from description to prescription that so perniciously underlies normative judgements. Yet each time a particular model of nature is called forth, other naturalisations are invoked, including of nature itself. As Taylor (2013, p. 16) noted: This European model of domesticated, cultivated nature also reflected the forging of a tamed childhood: I suggest that the European pastoral update of Nature’s Child was one that drew on a relatively domesticated notion of nature as rural idyll and projected it onto childhood by affirming the harmonious and natural affinity between children, domesticated farm animals and features of the peaceful rural landscape. Common sense or ‘second nature’ is a cultural construction, and what has come to be seen as specialist, technical or professional knowledge in this era of experts and consultants itself partakes of everyday conventions, assumptions and presumptions. As has often been pointed out, attending to these conventions and assumptions unsettles, or deconstructs, the usual valence or status hierarchy of the popular/professional binary since, by this analysis, the professional is merely mystifying or fabricating further resources arising from the popular or general culture. Yet here too potential problems remain: the form of this argument on ‘second nature’ could still imply the existence of a ‘first nature’, while there is room to consider even this as well as retroactive

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construction – as I elaborate further later. Cue the affective turn, the interest in the embodiment as a denunciation of the violence of representation, and all such calls for new materialism and empiricism (Davies, 2018; Murris & Bozalek, 2021). Yet it matters which examples one draws upon, and – if you are drawn to analyse typical or banalised truths, as I am – that is, the conventionally assumed – one is overwhelmed with candidates. Each ushers in its own history and field of argumentation, and also justification. Philippe Ariès (1962) is often cited as having invented childhood studies. His analysis was based on analysis of shifts in representations of children in art away from adult-like depictions, and so then debate centred on how this related to actual fields of practice and, in particular, relationships with children (e.g. Pollack, 1983). That is, it becomes a debate about forms of evidence, disciplinary domain (art history vs. social history), and methodological argument (inferring practice from historically available records and their selectivity), rather than disputing the central thesis or interpretation. So it is with the field of animal and child legal measures. Building on the discussion in Chapter  2, the fact that animals were tried for crimes in Medieval Europe might, or might not, suggest that medieval European cosmology accorded non-human agency or at least moral accountability. Understanding (cf. Schiff Berman, 1994) such court cases in social anthropological terms is compelling. Seeing this as a means of a society finding and making meaning, imposing (social, cognitive) order over chaotic, irrational events. Such discussions bring questions of meaning into the sociocultural domain and also make them functional (a long-standing trope of anthropological discourse). But being ‘functional’ does not mean such meaning-making processes work similarly, or fairly, for everyone. Relevant examples here include the witch hunts, the Inquisition, the millions of women murdered, and the absence of completely black cats in Europe arising from their extermination as supposed witches’ ‘familiars’. Another example is the blood libel cases, the many court cases – none proven, but that did not prevent continuing claims of the murder, by ritual slaughter, of Christian boys by Jews. Arguably, this continuing theme marks the origins of European racism, and perhaps even sets the paradigm for it (see Chapter 1, also Harrowitz, 1994). We have to start somewhere, and we (each of us in our different but sometimes partially shared locations) are indeed somewhere, so I  reflect on my own place and placing. Disciplines and methods

I will start with some disciplinary and methodological positioning to clarify the status of the discussion that follows. Although trained neither in law nor

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in history, as someone working around conceptions of childhood and development, I find myself engaging with both, as well as postcolonial and queer theory. It has become increasingly urgent to formulate a critical account of child– animal and animal–human relations that resist spurious abstraction and universalisation of precisely the kind offered by bourgeois developmental psychology of the Global North. Questions of development evoke the legacies, exclusions, hierarchies and pathologisations of the European empire (Rollo, 2018a, 2018b; Rabello de Castro, 2021; Rabello de Castro & Baraldi, 2020). These cultural-political exclusions were legitimised, or rendered natural, by reference to models of the bourgeois family. As noted in Chapter 2, this model of the family sanctioned the white man’s rule over his colonial subjects by virtue of the assumed legitimacy of his rule over his wife and children. Noteworthy here is how this legitimisation of the gender and generational inequalities within the household – via the naturalisation of the model of the bourgeois heteropatriarchal family – also installed a narrative of progress ‘marshalling a bewildering array of cultures into a single, global, narrative ordered and managed by Europeans’ (McClintock, 1995, p. 45). And – crucial for my argument here – this was via the installation of these axes of power and oppression as a natural order. That is, there was a key shift in the conception of nature, ‘from divine inspiration to imperial presumption’ (McClintock, 1995, p. 45). These elisions between particular historically elaborated and framed notions of childhood and their correspondingly gendered, racialised and classed, conceptions of nature – including human–animal relations – have attracted critical attention, and it is no accident that Taylor’s (2013) critique of the role of nature education in childhood schooling is written from the postcolonial context of Australia. Yet the romanticisms live on in theory as in practice, with the trinketisation (Hutnyk, 2004) of the child functioning as a key motif in maintaining the link between childhood and the infantilisation of the global south, correlatively maintaining the benevolence of the Western consumer. So even as ‘nature’ (human nature, essence, force, the natural world; Williams, 1977) becomes a site of interrogation rather than founding presumption, romanticism continues to lurk within current as well as past conceptions of childhood. Such conceptions underlie, or even typify, models of individual and human development and so forms of privilege and occlusion are harboured, implicitly if not explicitly. Thus, debate now insists on specific historical, geographical and legal focus, to resist too simple generalisations and instead of attending to competing currents and nuances: that is, the aim is to offer what Marilyn Strathern (1992) describes as exemplary rather than statistical understandings, as a way to develop and deepen analysis. As she puts it: none of us leads generalised lives, only specific ones. One therefore always works through concrete instances, and encounters general ideas, values,

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norms, habits of conduct in particular forms. It is in this sense than I take “English kinship” as a particular form of Western kinship. But my concern is not with a subculture of Western culture and the relationship is not part to whole. An exemplification is at once more than and less than its generalisable features. (24–5) I will return to Strathern and the status of the exemplar later, having made the case for this more circumscribed account that is both ‘more than and less than’ general. But now I turn to the moral and legal status of children and animal, and, within a Child as method frame, to see what the relations between these indicates about gender and racialisation. Legal accountabilities

The question of changing laws – how laws have changed, and whether laws change cultural practice or reflect it – remains much debated. Here, I want merely to note that what counts as law relies on conventional meanings, even as it attempts to formalise and sometimes contest these. As many commentators have noted, the history of legal measures elaborated in relation to animals and children can be read as indicative of broader social currents (Ingold, 2002, 2016; Hillier, 2013). In this sense, the continuing debate about foxhunting in the UK can be viewed as indicative of British concerns with class. Indeed, the classic text on the social functions and meanings of sport and leisure by Elias and Dunning (1986) takes foxhunting as its paradigm for the ‘quest for excitement’ (in the form of social legitimisation of aggression, competition and collective activity). It is relevant to recall that Elias was himself a refugee forced migrant to the UK so his ‘outsider’ view on British class habits offered him particular insights. As seen in the previous chapter, there is a large literature (with Evans, 1906, a key source) on the question of the moral status accorded animals, based on documented court cases from the European medieval period. These not only involved prosecutions of animals but also apparently insects and even non-animate entities such as statues (Schiff Berman, 1994). Some accounts caution against reading these as implying, or even being primarily concerned with, questions of the agency (and so culpability) accorded the prosecuted non-human party. Instead, the focus is to highlight the diversity and complexity of social agendas such trials fulfilled. Hence, Schiff Berman (1994) emphasises the social function of trials, not only to resolve disputes, but also to adjudicate among competing available social and political narratives, that is, as cultural storytelling. Drawing on Victor Turner’s ideas, it is suggested that the judicial process enacts a broader social drama, expressing

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a community’s efforts to re-establish a sense of order and meaning over irrational or inexplicable events. The judicial proceedings against animals and inanimate objects help us see how trials can act to create rationalizing narratives. When statues fall from the sky or pigs kill a small child or rats destroy the crops, there is a sense of disorder and irrationality which the society’s primary institutions must address. Random acts of violence caused by insensate agents bring a deep feeling of lawlessness: not so much the fear of law being broken, but the far worse fear that the world might not be a lawful place at all. The courts allow the community to establish cognitive control, to impose order on a world of random violence, and to create a narrative that makes sense of inexplicable events by redefining them as crimes and placing them within the rational discourse of the trial. (Schiff Berman, 1994, pp. 318–319) The claim here is that By trying an animal or an object using the exact formula applied to a human murderer, the court was incorporating the human and nonhuman within one community of justice .  .  . thereby healing the breach of the social order. (Schiff Berman, ibid., 321–322, emphasis added) Of course, such emphasis on social consensus should not be regarded as benign. A relevant example already noted is the witch hunts which took place in Europe from the 14th to 17th centuries in which it is estimated that up to 50,000 people died, three-quarters of whom were women (Gendercide Watch, n.d., see also Briggs, 1996; Willis, 2018). Continuing with parochial examples, in terms of English law and history, many commentators point to the fact that animals gained legal protection before children. As discussed in Chapter  2, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) preceded the founding of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) by some 50 years and, in terms of the trajectory of child and animal-focused rescue initiatives, there were major organisational connections between the RSPCA and the NSPCC from the latter’s earliest days. The increasing distance of the two organisations from each other by the end of the nineteenth century was attributed (by Flegel, 2009) to the NSPCC’s changing explanatory framework for child cruelty that differentiated it from cruelty to animals. This rationale was in addition to structural tensions between the two organisations, including competition for funding. While a common link often made between violence against children and against animals is male violence, Flegel highlights the move made by the

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NSPCC as it became a national organisation, to shift its explanatory frameworks away from environmental neglect and social conditions (which she notes was there within the initial formulations offered by the first organisation in Liverpool) to focus on questions of individual emotional inadequacy. Murdering (by neglect) a child for its insurance money, and living off a child’s labor are crimes that share, in other words, the same root cause. In both cases the child is abused as a result of the parent’s or guardian’s failure to recognize his or her own duties and responsibilities to towards the child, and his or her desire to benefit financially from the child. Such a stance succeeds in constructing child abuse as a crime that shares universal – i.e. non-class-specific – motivations, but it also succeeds in portraying choices imposed by poverty and necessity as evidence of, at best, a lack of affect and at worst, greed. (Flegel, 2009, p. 135) This highlights how apparently recent national and international policy and academic themes of emotional literacy, mindfulness and pedagogies of parentcraft now inhabiting national and international policy are not new, even if they have now acquired a decorative gloss of neuroscience (without necessarily any substantial relevance or deep engagement with this – as is further discussed in Chapter 5). As with the rise of adverse child experiences (ACEs), not only does the focus on emotions work to occlude class deprivation, such that abuse comes to arise from insensitivity or bad character rather than socio-economic pressures (see Edwards et al., 2019; White et al., 2019). Pets and/as children

Further conceptual and methodological considerations are posed by claims of a specifically English sensibility around animals. Here, I  draw on but also amplify Strathern’s (1992) analysis. To briefly outline her arguments, in addition to engaging in a wide-ranging discussion of English anthropology, Strathern’s primary concern is to account for how the notion of kinship, so central to social anthropology, underwent a shift from describing class/rank relationships to signifying something biological. The consequences of this, she argues, are profound, because ‘.  .  . the antithesis between nature and culture as it might have shaped certain discourses in English life has become flattened’ (5). This biologisation of the notion of kin, she claims, is responsible for the eclipsing of both nature and culture from dominant models of the construction of the individual subject. What remains is an individual elaborated outside the social, an individual composed of consumer choices, that paradoxically dissolves into its plural fragmentations. (In a segue to the

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analysis of Perec’s Les Choses/Things, discussed in Chapter 9), individuality becomes style, a matter of choice, or what you buy. But once the cultural, the social and even history itself disappear, then – Strathern argues – the individual also disappears. How this happens, or at least how it happens from the resources mobilised from English anthropologists (for recall that Strathern is reflexively discussing and intervening in this specifically local debate) turns out to be because, at least according to some English anthropologists, relationships with pets prefigure those with children. Clearly, the terminology of pets and petting calls for critical evaluation, as well as their demeaning, paternalist and sexualised connotations (which I will say more about shortly) such that Haraway’s (2003) term ‘companion species’ is preferable (see also Ingold, 2016). Also noteworthy is a key shift in the discourse about animals. Recall (as noted in Chapter 2), the court cases against animals were largely concerned with livestock, that is animals kept for husbandry, or else the cases concerned wild animals (rodents or even insects) rather than ‘pets’. It seems that ‘pets’, who might also be understood as household members, were denied responsibility or culpability while livestock assets or predatory entities outside the household were invested with these qualities. Strathern makes little of this, which is surprising, given the significance of this point in relation to her argument about the demise of relational notions of kinship. Yet this is central to her argument about the end of discourses of culture and nature, and their corresponding return as postnatural ethicalpolitical questions around the role of technology in creating both new forms of life and death. This point is also not acknowledged by others who have taken up Strathern’s discussion in relation to childhood. For example, Taylor frames Strathern’s point as follows: ‘The little-known fact that this peculiarly English tradition of petting animals underpins the sacrosanct notion of the individual child as special and unique foreshadows child-animal relation as a potentially fertile ground for queering and reconfiguring the “natures of childhood” ’ (Taylor, 2013, p. 85). So it seems that relationalities are not all the same but are, rather, differently allocated and distributed. The natural world has long been understood as a mirror for internal affective states, and Strathern discusses how, for the English middle classes, this features in relation to gardens and from thence into houses with the ‘English cottage garden’ a key social – and therefore classed – icon of order and harmony. Hence, the transition of relation from livestock to pet, from contributor, to participant within or even acknowledged member of, the household is clearly both affectively and socially significant. Caring for and having the means to feed and provide for animals is of course a marker of economic development, as well as a shift into modern

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capitalist relations of commodity fetishism underlying notions of individual ownership, consumption and display. So how discourses around pet ownership relate to those around children is a matter of some interest (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019) that can also articulate prevailing state-citizen responsibilities and also mobilise racialised geopolitical sentiments. For example, Chen (2012) addresses the complexity surrounding some nationstate imperatives that demand pet neutering, as well as reports (in US media) of China issuing a ‘one dog policy’ (so reiterating other long-standing transnational perceptions). What is supposedly specific to English animal affective engagement is the claim that emotions that, elsewhere in Europe, were attached to children were initially expressed instead in relation to animals. That this in itself was proposed as arising from a displaced sense of parental affection thwarted due to small family size adds a further recursive twist to this debate, as in Strathern’s discussion of Alan MacFarlane’s claims about the origins of English individualism (see also White  & Vann, 1983; MacFarlane, 1978a, 1978b, 1987). The sense of uniqueness or special-ness generated by the relation with animals (and children) is linked by Strathern to sentimentality, an affective relation that has come to be attached to children. In turn, this uniqueness came, she argues, to underlie notions of individuality that parents both harbour and foster. By this, they create – out of their diversity – a new unity – a unique individual. That is, their relationship produces a new unique entity. But the scientisation of notions of kinship, which privileges the new individual as the product of the relationship, rather than the process of its construction has, she claims, eclipsed the relational character of this individual. This creates individualism out of a notion of individuality, which ultimately has given rise to individualist subjects cast adrift from the social, cultural and natural. She puts it like this: The English have a special emotion for dwelling on tradition, for dwelling on what is just out of reach of enterprise: sentimentality. The sentimentality for pets is a case in point. Macfarlane is taken with Thomas’s idea of the link between keeping pets and “a modern, atomistic, kinship system”. (1983, p. 95) The link between pets and kinship is via emotional satisfaction – pets act as substitutes for children. Strathern highlights how Macfarlane traces this back to medieval times: ‘Such a need for surrogates is to be interpreted with respect to all the characteristics of English kinship that set it off from its European congeners, such as late marriage, low birth rate, isolated living units’ (Strathern, 1992, p. 12). These features – late marriage, low birth rate, isolated living units – are precisely the correlates of modernity associated

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with industrialisation and indeed this is why, Strathern goes on to argue, capitalism took off so early in England. She continues: Pets were regarded as luxuries, as alternative children, which in turn meant that the English came to regard children as luxuries, also, as superior pets, and sentimentally accorded them a kind of uniqueness thereby. He [Macfarlane] cites (1986, p. 54ff) sixteenth and seventeenth century depictions of children indulged and petted as playthings. And like pets, he intriguingly adds, in time “they would leave their owners: pets died, children left home, and withdrew emotionally” (1986, p. 55). (ibid., p. 12) Strathern distances herself from endorsing Macfarlane’s claim about emotions, pets and childhood (which in turn he generated through engagement with Keith Thomas’ work, MacFarlane, 1983). This is because of the problem she sees in the timeless, universal status he appears to accord this claim. Instead, and this is what I find so interesting, her focus is on how the specialness of the child (modelled on that of pets) created the form of discourse about kinship that produced the very individual that could make the social character of its construction disappear. Yet, important as this is, neither Strathern nor McClintock addresses the intersectional aspects of the relationship between adults and children other than to discuss the implications for women of their reproductive status in relation to children. Anticipating and even subverting more recent relativising moves (Fox, 2004), Strathern’s anthropological intervention is to make the English, and particularly English anthropologists, the object of the anthropological gaze. Other authors, however, have explored the gender, generation and colonialism intersections and demonstrated their significance. Stoler (2010) meticulously analyses the colonial archive of the Dutch East Indies, tracing the complex ways emotional and political agendas intertwine around the creation, care for, and education of children, while Gandhi (2006) highlights the forging of relationships around animal welfare as key to the creation of wider ‘affective communities’ in Victorian England. What such specific studies allow is attention to tensions within, and even surprising reversals, of dominant colonial agendas (Stoler, 2001), as where for example access to education for what might now be termed ‘mixed race’ (or mixed heritage) children became a key feature in colonisers opposing the colonial policies of the ‘centre’ (see also Stoler, 2005). Which animal? Affectional speciesist stereotypes

There are other specific literatures, and specific stories to tell about every animal, and human–animal relations. I have been dealing here dealing with

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animals in general and how they relate to conceptions of childhood, gender, and culture. Yet each animal is situated within specific cultural imaginaries. While dogs may be ‘man’s best friends’, known for their loyalty, devotion, fidelity, perseverance (think of St. Bernards), and a long-standing domesticated animal addition to the human household, pigs are more often a source of food and income – even if the stye was close to or even within the home. (Pigs and chickens surely feed the Majority world from the ­Philippines to Peru.) There is endless literature to analyse on cats, ranging from Derrida’s extended discussion (see Derrida, 2008) to Klemperer’s (2006) exploration of how donations to the German Prevention of Cruelty to Cats disclosed how ‘system’ and ‘organisation’ functioned in the language of the Third Reich. Natsume Soseki’s (1906) I am a cat is a classic example of the narrator adopting the persona of a cat to document and comment on modernising Japan, thus materialising the self-satisfied indifference attributed to both cats and young children noted by Freud (1914/1957) in his discussion of narcissism. There is also the more recent derided (misogynist and ageist) figure of the cat-lady, as well as the online phenomenon of LOL cats. ‘The secret life of cats’ not only boosted the BBC’s TV viewing figures for June 2013 but also has been reissued in 2019 and 2020. It works precisely as a representation of English village life, as much as for those of us who go soppy over feline figures, while at the time of its first screening, an Internet provider showed a picture of a cat peering out of a moving car window with the caption ‘Be more dog’ (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIQV9fcUhHw), presumably attempting to mobilise characteristics of being ‘stay at home’ and ‘on the prowl’ simultaneously, whilst also mobilising the supposed enmity or competition between dogs and cats, as well as the human personality characteristics culturally ascribed to ‘dog people’ and ‘cat people’. Once again, the genre of intruding (including projecting) into the lives of animals transfers onto children, with from 2015 onwards the franchise turning into an endless sequence of ‘secret lives of’ two-, three- and four-year-olds (all available on YouTube). Footage from portable cameras gives an illusion of the subject’s (whether child or animal) point of view, prepared for the audience to foster this interpretation, so simultaneously both capturing and erasing their otherness. Yet (as with the foetal ultrasound images discussed in Chapter 5) even as the gap between viewer and subject appears to be closed, it is reproduced by its displacement of the act of interpretation (with the voice-over composing the narrative that renders the actions comprehensible). Children and small animals (especially ‘pets’) offer the least threatening encounters with otherness, or what might here better be called creatureliness or beastliness. As is discussed further in Part II, this otherness is of course constitutive within the human subject, rather than outside it – even if we prefer to locate it beyond ourselves. Ambiguities and the shared liminal status of children and animals

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in Western culture have provided a key arena for exploring such concerns (Griffiths, 2002). In the ‘secret life’ genre, surveillance comes to stand for and replaces subjectivity, such that any ‘secret life’ is thereby foreclosed. Monkey business

One specific animal–human connection merits particular discussion. The child–monkey association clearly has a long history, in Britain and Europe even before colonial times. Donna Haraway’s (1989) wonderful volume Primate Visions provides the paradigmatic analysis of how models of ‘nature’ are constructed to confirm human arrangements and distributions of privilege (as especially reflecting and organised classed, gendered and racialised relations), with representatives of our primate ancestors a key site for this dynamic of retroactive projection and legitimation. These representations are diverse and contradictory, ranging from what Harry Harlow’s ‘rape rack’ (yes, that’s he called it), the apparatus to impregnate monkeys for the experiments on his maternal deprivation thesis (also discussed in Burman, 2017), to Jane Goodall’s anthropomorphic ethnographies (see Haraway, 1989). Connecting women’s reproductive and domestic labour with colonial themes are other transitions and relations between gendered labour and animal/child study. Victorian England saw a vogue for studying monkeys, which was popularised by Frank Buckland and George Romanes (the latter heralded as Darwin’s successor). Indeed, Shuttleworth (2013) points to a long historical association between children and monkeys that predates evolutionary theory, dating back to Elizabethan times. But mid-nineteenthcentury diary studies of monkeys appear as much the site of gendered struggle as concerned with children, since middle-class women were installed as carers, rather than co-investigators, of these pet monkeys. The question posed by such animal-child and human–nonhuman connections concerns what kind of relations are being asserted: are they relations of co-existence, continuity, identity, transition, transformation or even metamorphosis? Animal stories are a staple of children’s literature, and colonial literature especially. Rudyard Kipling has been accorded a special analysis as offering models of child–animal relations that mediate, and modulate, as well as recapitulate colonial processes (see Walsh, 2010). Animals function in children’s literature as parable and fable, often in pedagogical ways. Even the current literature on ecocriticism has been said to be inspired by authors’ childhood exposure to animal stories (Lesnik-Oberstein, 2023). People are transformed into animals or objects – as punishment or via enchantment – in folk and fairy tales across cultures. Eric Linklater’s (1944/2000) Wind on the Moon is merely one example (albeit one that I  loved as a child). This story concerns twin girls, Dinah and Dorinda, who sometimes transform themselves into being either (what

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is perceived as being) too fat or too thin (so various forms of bodily as well as species transition are topicalised). They also turn into animals and then join forces with other animals from a zoo who liberate themselves from this (perhaps there is a comment here on the prison-like status of childhood, especially girlhood here?). Altogether, they go to rescue the girls’ father from his captivity in the evocatively named ‘Bombardy’ with the help of a puma. Not insignificantly (although discussion of this book as a ‘critical posthuman’ account fails to mention this, Molander Danielsson, 2017), the book is profoundly colonial, with the main action happening in ‘Bombardy’ (surely some kind of quasi-Balkan state? And don’t let’s forget Said’s, 1978, analysis of the Orient as first qualifying the Balkans), where the father is posted as a colonial officer. In this text, the two girl children mobilise multiple resonances that range across the not-quite-human, the incipient human, and the more than human. They shift between child and animal in ways that link them with the natural world, as well as the fabulous and bizarre. This ‘return’ to nature also mobilises a connection with notions of ‘natural justice’, even more so as the happy ending restores all humans to their rightful place – and, for Dinah and Dorinda and their father, back ‘home’ in England. The storyline can be seen as reiterating what Massey (1976) highlighted as the narrative and plot function of metamorphosis: ‘Metamorphosis, with all its pain, is about a reconciliation of silence with speech, and of the damned with the divine; about a reconciliation that takes place beyond the possibility of reconciliation, after hopeless suffering’ (195–6). Similarly, the monkey–child connection can run in both directions, with the monkey qualities to be indulged as well as educated. Children’s meals used to be advertised in a cafe bar near my house on a ‘Cheeky monkeys’ menu. ‘Monkey puzzle’ nurseries, a UK chain of around 60 early childcare and education facilities, encapsulate the ambivalence of this trope. As an aside, a further local child-nature colonial resonance to acknowledge here is that the monkey puzzle tree – native to Chile and Argentina where it was used by indigenous people as an important food source – was brought to Europe first by Spanish colonists (Aagesen, 1998). It became the favourite tree for Victorian gardens (Haebich, 2003), and continues to figure as an outsize addition to many current suburban British gardens, as well as parks and stately homes, where the geometric shapes of its branches impress. Continuing with the resonances of ‘Monkey puzzle’ as the name of a franchise of childcare settings, this appears to render the puzzle both as the child and for the child; that is, it includes the puzzle of how to make a human child, which is, of course the question of ontology (as well as part of the culturalpolitical project of care and education). Yet at the same time, it evokes the unknowability of the child as animal, as well as the activity of coming to know the child and the child coming to know itself. The organisation’s byline is ‘providing a safe, secure and caring environment’ for children aged

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3 months to 5  years, while the website (https://monkeypuzzledaynurseries. com/) also advertises preschool provision and mobilises the discourse of school readiness, including the claim that: All children’s development at the nursery is underpinned by the Early Years Foundation Stage which is the framework that your child will be assessed under in their first year at school. At our nurseries, we do this by carefully weaving development into your child’s play each and every day. https://monkeypuzzledaynurseries.com/ (accessed August 25, 2023) What is interesting is how the schoolification narrative (Alcock & Haggerty, 2013; Brogaard Clausen, 2015; Bradbury, 2020) has intensified over the years that this company has been in business. It should be noted that the care/ education binary has not only structured the hierarchy of professions and their gendered relations (with women associated with the caring and less senior educational poles of each) but also reflected different ontological models of mutability or identity. Care is oriented to a more static discourse of ‘support’, while ‘education’ implies a developmental model. Care versus education also maps onto the binary between security and stimulation (which itself has a gendered history in terms of developmental psychological attributions of parental division of labour in heterosexual couples, see Burman, 2017). It is also worth recalling that ‘educability’ was a key term in the structuring of the early school systems (Rose, 1985), and it is surely something that is seen to differentiate between humans and (some, most) animals. To take a final, if extreme, example, the long-standing cultural fascination with ‘wild children’, that is, children who have long lived with or even been brought up by animals (see also Seshadri, 2012), appears to have taken a new twist with cases of girls abducted and secretly held in captivity and sexual slavery for decades in basements of suburban men’s houses. Since the first reported cases were in Austria and Belgium in the early 2010s, I initially wondered if this was a bizarre reworking of World War II hiding stories. However, since similar cases then emerged in the US it appears that this is perhaps a phenomenon of the overdeveloped world – one that also marks the shift of the gender of the child victim from boy to girl (see also Poretti et al., 2014), even as girls became the prime focus of development policy (Brown, 2021). So truly real™

So the relationships between cultural and gendered representations of children and animals include blending, blurring, bi-directional relationships or are even hybrid. Can such considerations help illuminate the phenomenon of the market for girl-baby-monkey-dolls?

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The Internet as well as cheap magazines (e.g. What’s On TV, Britain’s bestselling (cheapest) TV listings paper) carries many advertisements for ‘Ashton-drake galleries’ dolls, both new and second-hand versions (https:// www.ashtondrake.com/c/monkeys.html) Ashton Drake | Lifelike Monkey Dolls | The Bradford Exchange (accessed August 5, 2023). While there are a couple of commemorative (‘heritage’) dolls (a ‘handcrafted’ Santa and a ‘musical’ Snow White), all the others are baby dolls or monkey dolls, around 20 of them, and most are baby-monkey dolls. In 2013, when I first noticed these, both the baby dolls and the monkey dolls were described in feminine gendered terms. By 2022, there were ‘boy’ versions (e.g. ‘Milo, the Safari monkey’ and ‘Abe’s hugs poseable’), but at the time of writing this (2023), it’s still 2:1, girl-to-boy dolls. Not only is the range of possible dolls astonishing in their repetition with only minor variations, but they are also not marketed for children: the recommended age of purchaser is specified as being 14+; that is, for young adults upwards. The primary discourse is one of ‘art’: the publicity describes them as ‘by master artists’ (they omit saying ‘made’ before ‘by’), and they are described as ‘collectables’ rather than playthings (indeed the copyright statement for each doll carries the advice ‘This doll is not a toy; she is a fine collectable to be enjoyed by adult collectors’. Walter Benjamin’s discussion of ‘collecting’ comes to mind, as an activity that borders the logic of accumulation and so also disrupts this (Benjamin, 1973). While some of the monkey dolls are named, others such as ‘your picture-perfect baby doll’ of the 2022 collection were explicitly presented with the invitation to ‘Name her yourself . . . and make her your own!’. Possession mixes with affection and care (‘she’s simply adorable’), even if the unique relational features are somewhat belied by the simultaneous discourse of addition and substitution implied by ‘collection’. Indeed, they perhaps more closely correspond to the emerging market for lifelike, substitute babies or ‘Re-borns’™ (Williams, in The Week, 14 January  2012, 40–41). Clearly, such artefacts are on a continuum with others that aim to be as realistic as humans as to invite intimate relational interaction, such as sex dolls. The publicity overwhelmingly emphasises touch, realism, and relationship. You can pose, touch, and interact with, these ‘lifelike’ dolls, who are ‘so truly real™’. The conjunction of the two words (‘truly’ and ‘real’), that seem to say the same thing, tells it all: they are true (authentic, not a lie, not artificial); and they are ‘real™’. They have lifelike skin (‘Cast in baby-soft RealTouch® vinyl to look and feel so real’). For example, ‘Precious Poppy’ is described as follows: With Poppy’s poseable, full vinyl arms and legs, hand-inset beckoning eyes, delicate handpainted fingernails and her hand-applied genuine mohair, you won’t believe how lifelike she is! Plus, her hand-painted face with fine

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creases under her eyes, indentation marks on her nose, and affable smile create a realistic look and feel for you to love’. The detail of clothing adds to the sense of sensuality as well as bodily intimacy: For the perfect finishing touch, this little monkey wears a custom-designed poppy-printed bubble romper with ruffle trim and a matching detailed pink flower headband. The romper features a soft pink bow, pink puffy sleeves, and fine lace trim around the neck and waist. (ibid.) The heart that substitutes for the ‘o’ in ‘so truly real’ reiterates how the ‘truth’ comes from the affective engagement, from the human buyer’s desire, and the qualification of the trademark around ‘real’ (®) signifies how it is not real at all. What these dolls seem to address, then, is a desire for connection and relationship: ‘Everything about this lifelike baby monkey will make you want to hold her tight and never let go. And best yet . . . you’ll never have to!’. So what is attributed here is the desire to care for a dependent (but not too onerously so) other; the desire to love and so to be loved (‘she’ll grab hold of your finger and your heart!’ is repeated in several depictions). Over and over again, there is an emphasis on how ‘poseable’ the dolls are, and the sense of touch, of touching something that is ‘like’ skin. There are of course other ‘collected’ objects that are marketed for their softness, pose ability and hug-ability. One doesn’t have to have too smutty a mind to think of other equivalents of a battery-controlled doll’s hand grasping a finger. Enough of these dolls must sell to make it worth advertising them every week and across the decades (while there is surely an empirical project to research who actually buys them). Moreover, there is nothing new about monkey dolls, and perhaps these even preceded the teddy bear (see Haraway, 1984–5; Burman, 2019), just as monkey ‘pets’ were documented in medieval England (Shuttleworth, 2013). But the combination of baby, monkey and girl bears some thinking about, beyond mere cuddleability. Clearly, this artefact addresses an audience perceived to lack cuddles, to lack kinship, connection, relationship, and especially tactile interaction. The animal semiotically links back to nature, as does the liminal human baby; and its feminised (and non-white versions?) more so. It does not seem too far-fetched to consider such popularity as expressing a nostalgia for unproblematic relationships of ownership, of possession, that fulfil ‘petting’ needs such that the feminised, infantilised, pretend or proxy animal/human offers a socially sanctioned site for this. The long history of child and animal loving mobilises many complexities and ethical-political and legal dilemmas. Care and concern have perhaps

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always been infused with some degree of sexualisation or seduction, as the history of the emergence of child welfare and protection indicates (Steedman, 1995; Kincaid, 1992). At least one key feature that these current artefacts surely addresses is a presumed sense of human isolation, and the need to restore connection, relationship. Seeking this through inanimate individual (and there is quite a lot of emphasis in the publicity on their ‘individuality’) animal-baby dolls that can be held, hugged, and posed could also be read as reflecting Strathern’s (1992) thesis that nature, along with the social, has been eclipsed by current configurations of individual subjectivity. Further, does Strathern’s marking of the tenuous and contingent character of these connections warn us about the dangers of spurious universalisation creeping in precisely again via tropes of emoting to and around children, or animals? Animal and child welfare fund-raising make these links explicitly, while no treatment of the links between deprivation and seduction in representations of children and animals can fail to note the dreadful virtual catwalk (noting the gender/animal conflation here) of online photo-galleries that promote adoption – or in its slightly better form, perhaps, sponsorship – of both children and animals (such as Brooke on donkeys, or ‘woofbark’ or ‘I need a home’ for dogs). In Brooke’s case, sometimes the address has been to both: ‘A donkey in pain, A child in poverty. Now you can help them both with the Brooke’ was the slogan back in 2008, although more recently the ‘help’ provided to the former (usually brown skinned, young and female) companions of these animals is implied by visual juxtaposition rather than explicitly specified (https://www.thebrooke.org/, accessed August  5, 2023). Still, these campaigns subject both children and animals ‘in need’ to the arbitrariness of subjective aesthetic evaluation and whim. While the distance between marketing and practice in such organisations should be recognised, still the question of why this marketing is perceived to ‘work’ remains. It has long been acknowledged that child sponsorship schemes actually support families and communities rather than individual children (Bornstein, 2001), while Brooke’s international programmes now promote community development and training. Nevertheless, the appeal to animals within the same register as is used for promoting aid to children does, I suggest, maintain a particularly problematic mode of affective engagement precisely through the ambiguities of the analogical comparisons at play. Love, hate and sentimentality

There is now a substantial literature documenting how legal discourses around rights and welfare connect with affective responses of seduction and deprivation. The history of child concern reflects this, as in, for example, Steedman’s (1995) discussion of the British nineteenth-century parliamentary reformer who campaigned for the prohibition of child labour, Henry

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Mayhew. Similar dynamics are at play in the consumption of images of distressed children: Without the image of the unhappy child, our contemporary concept of childhood would be incomplete. Real children suffer in many different ways and for many different reasons, but pictures of sorrowing children recall those defining characteristics of childhood: dependence and powerlessness. (Holland, 1992, p. 148) Just as orientalism is the apparently ‘positive’ face of naked racism, what the predilection for ‘sorrowing children’ indicates is that distress and suffering can gratify. This is not to imply that all love is abusive, nor indeed that all ‘hate’ is harmful. I will return shortly to this question, drawing on the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s notion of objective hate. To aid this analysis, let us return to the significant claim made by Strathern that the emotion central to the dynamic of English individualism is sentimentality. The argument begins with MacFarlane’s (1987) claim: In the majority of societies, a combination of early marriage, constant child-bearing, the close physical and emotional presence of numerous kin, together provide the emotional satisfactions which many people now find in their pets. Now that we know that this individualistic-kinship and marriage system is very old in England, probably dating in its central features to at least the thirteenth century if not before, it is not difficult to see that pet-keeping and a fondness for nature are very early and related phenomena. Just as English children were luxuries, regarded as superior pets, so English pets were luxuries, regarded as alternative children. (12, emphasis added) There are clear resonances with discussions of the changing ‘value’ of children as labour or legacy to expressing some ineffable ‘pricelessness’ in modern industrialised contexts (Zelizer, 1994). This is also where Winnicott’s (1949) comments on ‘truly objective counter-transference’ – the child patient’s capacity to evoke objective and justified hate in their parent or analyst – comes in. Sometimes children, and adults, act in hateful ways; that is, in ways that aim to provoke hate. It is the adult/therapist’s job to manage that hate, and the way to do this is to recognise and acknowledge it, rather than deny it: ‘However much he loves his patients he cannot avoid hating and fearing them, and the better he knows this the less will hate and fear be the motives determining what he does to his patients’ (Winnicott, 1949, p. 68). Winnicott suggests that, when the time is right, communicating this recognition of that hatefulness to the child/analysand both can be therapeutic and

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is experienced by them as a relief. Psychology students I have taught, who are deeply humanist in orientation, are typically shocked to hear this, but the parents amongst them become convinced when I read them Winnicott’s list of 18 ‘reasons why a mother hates a baby, even a boy’ (ibid., 72–3). Let us just pause, for a moment over that ‘even a boy’ comment, as it reflects a world of culturally constructed gendered preferences and understandings, even as it also brings new readings to Alice in Wonderland’s Duchess discussed in the previous Chapter, when she claims of her baby, ‘he only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases’. What these ‘reasons’ bring to the fore is not only how motherhood and practices of mothering are culturally framed, and often intensely politically and professionally scrutinised and evaluated, but also that these practices are hugely indicative of prevailing racialised and gendered orders. They are racialised since Black women have long been, but continue to be, subject to the dynamic of normalised absence/pathologised presence identified by Phoenix (1987, 1991), while the historic – if not continuing – preference for boy children reflects prevailing inheritance patterns that produce and reproduce patriarchal assumptions about land, labour and production, and so is tied to very contingent but potent geomaterialist agendas. This apparently little example, ‘even a boy’, as an offhand addition (a feminist psychoanalytic colleague once quipped to me that surely it should be ‘especially’ rather than ‘even’, so intensifying the image of maternal ambivalence, see also Parker, 1995), shows Winnicott as both analyst of and participant within dominant cultural orders. As Riley (1983) showed, he was indeed a key populariser of psychoanalytic ideas, so informing as well as commenting on these. At the very least, such indicative inscriptions of prevailing ideological assumptions within psychoanalytic, as well as psychological, accounts betray psychoanalysis as itself a culturally inflected and produced interpretive resource. As with other frames, it correspondingly needs to be engaged with and mobilised with caution and criticality – as taken up in Part II of this book. For now, returning to Winnicott’s analysis, he continues: If the analyst is going to have crude feelings imputed to him [sic] he is best forewarned and so forearmed, for he must tolerate being placed in that position. Above all he must not deny hate that really exists in himself. Hate that is justified in the present setting has to be sorted out and kept in storage and available for eventual interpretation. (69, emphasis original) Jessica Benjamin, in her influential 1988 book Bonds of Love, develops Winnicott’s argument about the need for mothers, as well as analysts, to acknowledge (rather than hide or hide from) their hate, and about how the baby (or analysand) needs to know that the (m)other can survive the attack

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in order to find reassurance that their aggression is not all-destroying (and self-destroying). This is based on Winnicott’s claim: in certain stages of certain analyses the analyst’s hate is actually sought by the patient, and what is then needed is hate that is objective. If the patient seeks objective or justified hate he must be able to reach it, else he cannot feel he can reach objective love. . . . It seems that he can believe in being loved only after reaching being hated. (71) This is because denying this hate, this response, produces avoidance in the relationship; it promotes sentimentality. Sentimentality is precisely about not engaging with the specific. (Think of how the adjective ‘special’ is often used, paradoxically, to avoid talking about specificity). It is an affect that qualifies the one who feels it rather than necessarily having anything to do with the one to whom it is directed. That is, while sentimentality may confer a particular affective status, this is one whose specificity marks the bestower rather than the bestowed. Think here of the ways racism and colonialism deny specificity to the black person and, in the context of racist immigration controls, to the refugee and how this is central to their dehumanisation and degraded treatment (see Gündoğdu, 2022). Sentimentality, then, promotes the abstraction of the viewer/adult; it invites a studied distance, wilful disengagement; insincerity. Such dynamics apparently contrast with claims of (being) ‘so truly real’. Yet of course these precisely need to be asserted because the dolls are not truly real. But what this marketing relies upon, or else installs the sense of, is that many people really don’t have, and perhaps even don’t want to have, sincere relationships. The very superfluity of emotion marks the actual evacuation of a relationship. From Winnicott, again: Sentimentality is useless for parents, as it contains a denial of hate, and sentimentality in a mother is no good at all from the infant’s point of view. It seems to me doubtful whether a human child as he develops is capable of tolerating the full extent of his own hate in a sentimental environment. He needs hate to hate. (Winnicott, ibid., 73) Of course, caring for a dependent other is a demanding process. A further significant dynamic set in play by the dolls is that their bodily functions (e.g. of feeding and peeing), those urgent wetware characteristics that surely define human (as also other animals) specific, unique vitality, are under control. There is no need for recognition of another with independent, autonomous needs. So perhaps this highlights a societal condition of neither having, nor

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desiring to have, sincere relationships. The relationship with such a doll is precisely one that is shaped, literally posed, by its owner. Saying this is not incompatible with, for example, an actor–network theory conceptual framework, which would attend to the effects of the actions accorded the doll. Indeed, it is the effects of such affective relationships that demand analytical as well as ethical attention. It is the withholding of specificity, the refusal to engage at the level of the particular, the unique, that characterises sentimentality, just as the child is a substitute for a pet that is a substitute for a child. The chain of deferred and transferred affects seems not to stop. This is not to say that a purchaser of a monkey doll might not sincerely love it. Yet there appears to be overdetermination at work surrounding the question of sentiment and (lack of) language. Whose language, or lack of language? The infant child or monkey (who is, literally, without spoken language) or the unarticulated desires of the purchaser? A key emerging issue, therefore, is this. Does Strathern’s marking of the tenuous connections involved in the trajectory of citations provide a salutary warning about the dangers of spurious universalisation creeping in precisely again via tropes of emoting to and around children, or animals? So much of the radical, as well as oppressive, humanist project was expressed in terms of human beings’ superiority to (supposedly) dumb animals. This racialised, gendered – as well as generational – ‘chain of being’ is precisely what has secured and legitimated European colonial power. Focusing on sentiment may seem to concern the work of meaning-making, yet this process is wholly located in the meaning-maker. In speaking of being ‘being moved/touched’, what is obscured, then, is who does the moving (and touching). Child as method: interrogating claims to nature and truth

So foreclosed, nature comes back to bite us on the bum – like the escaped/ abandoned pet snakes (reported to be) in plumbing systems or on our planes (as literalised in the 2006 film of that title, Snakes on a plane directed by David Ellis). The promises of modernity, technology and development are increasingly proved hollow. Mechanisation either has put people out of work or else is used to make them work so hard they want to kill themselves (as in the Chinese workers making i-phones in buildings surrounded by nets to prevent the workers from throwing themselves off them) while human exploitation of mineral resources threatens the sustainability of the planet. The World Wide Web that was envisaged by feminists and other radicals (e.g. Haraway, 1991), as potentially enabling more relationships, greater connections across the world, destabilising fixed identities and the creation of new non-­hierarchical networks, has become stickier and started to close in on us. Technologies heralded as new media of expression, of liberation and

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collective mobilisation, have – through the alignment of possessive individualism with consumer capitalism – rather become devices confirming individual identities (as in whether an online profile is ‘true’ or not), and increasingly used as tools of surveillance, of bullying or cyberstalking or even – as with drones – tools of war. In this era of globalised communication, there remains a nostalgia for the natural, direct, physical relation that animals and children have come to symbolise. However, there may be resistance in material complexity such that the question of artefact (proxy and surrogate) and the multiple affects and effects of artificiality and (distributed) animacy can offer other possibilities. Performing her argument, Strathern, in her description of Macfarlane, moves between describing substitutes, surrogates, and proxies. Yet each of these mediating entities suggests its own complex of relations across time, space, parties and – crucially – constellations of power. The chain of citations and ambiguities of connection may well evoke diverse senses of effectivity (of the sort Braidotti, 2019, invokes as ‘transversality’) without origin or endpoint. Perhaps the marketing claim of being ‘so truly real™’ needs to be asserted precisely because it is very much not at all truly real; indeed, we can be sure of this, without knowing what ‘truly real’ is. This very reduced recognition of the need for relationships could be read as a pathetic indicator of alienation in postmodernity. Yet it may also be understood otherwise. For surely such artefacts invite a parodying of the socially sanctioned trope that reads the social onto the maternal or at best the caregiver, which is the cardinal error of developmental psychology taken up by policy makers (Riley, 1983). Models of social, national and economic as well as individual development reduce the social to the maternal, whether in terms of notions of attachment or emotional regulation, even down to the micro evaluation of parenting as in the classing of maternal speech as a means to promote children’s word acquisition (see, e.g. Allen & Spencer, 2022). Yet reading this subversively, or parodically, discloses the limitations of positing infant (animal) care as a microcosm of the field of social institutions producing and governing intimacy, even as it acknowledges this as a key factor. Hence, invitations to buy baby monkey dolls or other such products might indicate more than the general acceptability of the manufacture of (and so corresponding markets for outlets for) relationality imperatives under neoliberal capital. That is, the dolls may not simply speak to or express some deep, primordial, authentic need for touch and relationship. Instead, perhaps they work to incite this, and so generate the sense that we lack intimacy in everyday life. Here, we see another seduction, the seduction of deprivation, of lack, of victimhood perhaps, that mobilises a backward and inward look of nostalgia and retroactively installed singular autobiography. It performs the very absence that it marks. We need more than this.

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This chapter has come full circle from a tour of human–animal relations and colonial histories, back to critical psychology, and in particular back to discussions of psychologisation. Beyond such disciplinary concerns, there have also been methodological considerations. In fact, Strathern’s text is really primarily concerned with methodological and conceptual concerns in anthropology – about evidence, sources, interpretations and especially analysing what the relationship between a specific case and more general theory should be. As she comments: ‘Once diversity is admitted, we can conceive it as starting with individual experience and proliferating through heterogeneous populations and organisations in a way that defies as much as it aids reduction’ (Strathern, 1992, p. 24). As previously discussed, Child as method is an approach that interrogates the relations between psychic economies surrounding children and childhoods and political economy. This chapter, as well as the other two chapters comprising this part of the book, has considered in detail some psychoaffective dynamics mobilised by, around, and in relation to children and childhoods, as an awry intervention within recent social theory – especially childhood and educational studies – discussions of child/human/animal/ecology relations. Part II further explores the models of affect evaluating both cultural and geopolitical effects of developmentalist discourse, and the turn to psychoanalytic approaches as an antidevelopmentalist resource. But national cultures and corresponding political economies have never been far away. This is why ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016, puts it) is important, and (as Part III addresses) keeping the discussion of materialisms (of various kinds) grounded, so to speak. To be specific, as Galison (2004) noted, is not only a route to ward off spurious, empty universalisations, nor even to populate our analyses with panoplies of examples. Rather, to be exemplary, in Strathern’s sense, we have to work these examples, that is, to interpret them closely in order to gain traction on the slippery terrain of discussions that (as discussions of ‘travelling theory’ highlight, Said, 2022; Davis & Evans, 2011) too easily cross times and places without declaring how and why they are related, and what power relations are enacted or occluded in these movements. As with Bhambra’s (2007) critique of the notion of multiple modernities as obscuring the de-development of the Global South by the Global North, what is needed is, instead, the interrogation of specific inter-relations including, and indeed in order to identify and evaluate both the mutual implications and antagonisms. References Aagesen, D. L. (1998). On the northern fringe of the South American temperate ­forest: The history and conservation of the Monkey-Puzzle Tree. Environmental History, 3(1), 64–85.

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Alcock, S., & Haggerty, M. (2013). Recent policy developments and the “schoolification” of early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Signs, 26, 21–27. Allen, A., & Spencer, S. (2022). Regimes of motherhood: Social class, the word gap, and the optimisation of mothers’ talk. Sociological Review, 70(6), 1181–1198. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221104378 Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood. Cape. Barthes, R. (1977). The rhetoric of the image. In R. Barthes (Ed.), Image-music-text (pp. 32–52). Noonday. Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. Pantheon. Benjamin, W. (1973). Unpacking my library. A talk about book collecting. In W. Benjamin (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 61–69). Pantheon. Bhambra, G. K. (2007). Multiple modernities or global interconnections: Understanding the global post the colonial. Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization, 59–73. Bornstein, E. (2001). Child sponsorship, evangelism, and belonging in the work of World Vision Zimbabwe. American Ethnologist, 28(3), 595–622. Bradbury, A. (2020). Datafied at four: The role of data in the ‘schoolification’ of early childhood education in England. In J. Jarke & A. Breiter (Eds.), The datafication of education (pp. 8–22). Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2019). The posthuman. Polity. Briggs, R. (1996). Witches & neighbours: The social and cultural context of European witchcraft. Viking. Brogaard Clausen, S. (2015). Schoolification or early years democracy? A  cross-­ curricular perspective from Denmark and England. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 16(4), 355–373. Brown, K. (2021). Global girl policy and the girl effect: Gendered origins and silences. In D. Levinson, M. J. Maynes,  & F. Vayrus (Eds.), Children and youth as subjects, objects, agents: Innovative approaches to research across space and time (pp. 175–189). Palgrave Macmillan. Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). Routledge. Burman, E. (2019). Found childhood as a practice of child as method. Children’s Geographies, 20(3), 271–283. Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press. Clough, P. T. (2008). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(1), 1–22. Davies, B. (2018). Ethics and the new materialism: A  brief genealogy of the ‘post’ philosophies in the social sciences. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(1), 113–127. Davis, K., & Evans, M. (Eds.). (2011). Transatlantic conversations: Feminism as travelling theory. Ashgate. Derrida, J. (2008). The animal that therefore I am. Fordham University Press. Edwards, R., Gillies, V., & White, S. (2019). Introduction: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES)–implications and challenges. Social Policy and Society, 18(3), 411–414. Elias, N., & Dunning, E. (1986). The quest for excitement: Sport and leisure in the civilising process. Blackwell.

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Evans, E. P. (1906). The criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals. Faber & Faber. Flegel, M. (2009). Conceptualizing cruelty to children in nineteenth-century England: Literature, representation and the NSPCC. Ashgate. Foucault, M. (1981). History of sexuality (Vol. 1). Pelican. Fox, K. (2004). Watching the English: The hidden rules of English behaviour. Hodder & Stoughton. Freud, S. (1914/1957). On narcissism: An introduction. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIV (1914–1916): On the history of the psycho-analytic movement, papers on metapsychology and other works (pp. 67–102). (Original work published 1914). Hogarth Press. Galison, P. (1997). Material culture, theoretical culture and delocalization. University of Chicago Press. Galison, P. (2004). Specific theory. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 379–383. Gandhi, L. (2006). Affective communities: Anticolonial thought, fin-de-siècle radicalism, and the politics of friendship. Duke University Press. Gendercide Watch. (n.d.). Retrieved August 5, 2023, from https://www.faculty.umb. edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Arcana/ Witchcraft%20and%20Grimoires/case_witchhunts.html Griffiths, J. (2002). Almost human: Indeterminate children and dogs in ‘Flush’ and ‘The Sound and the Fury’. The Yearbook of English Studies, 163–176. Gündoğdu, A. (2022). Border deaths as forced disappearances. Puncta, 30(5/3), 12–41. Haebich, A. (2003). Assimilating nature: The bunya diaspora. Queensland Review, 10(2), 47–57. Haraway, D. J. (1984–5). Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936. Social Text, 11, 20–64. Haraway, D. J. (1989). Primate visions: Gender, race and nature in the world of modern science. Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science technology and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century. In D. J. Haraway (Ed.), Simians, cyborgs and women: The cultural reinvention of nature (pp. 159–181). Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2020). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In C. McCann & K. Seung-kyung Kim (Eds.), Feminist theory reader (pp. 303–310). Routledge. Harrowitz, N. (1994). Anti-semitism, misogyny  & the logic of cultural difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao. University of Nebraska Press. Holland, P. (1992). What is a child? Popular images of childhood. Virago. Hutnyk, J. (2004). Photogenic poverty: Souvenirs and infantilism. Journal of Visual Culture, 3(1), 77–94. Ingold, T. (2002). From trust to domination: An alternative history of human-animal relations. In Animals and human society (pp. 13–34). Routledge. Ingold, T. (2016). What is an animal? Routledge. Kincaid, J. (1992). Child-loving: The erotic child and Victorian culture. Routledge.

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Klemperer, V. (2006). Language of the third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii. A&C Black. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (2023, in press) Literature, literary pedagogy, and extinction rebellion (XR): The case of Tarka the Otter. In J. Parham (Ed.), The literature and politics of the environment. Boydell and Brewer. Linklater, E. (1944/2000). The wind on the moon. Macmillan/Jane Nilson Books. MacFarlane, A. (1978a). The origins of English individualism: Some surprises. Theory and Society, 6(2), 255–277. MacFarlane, A. (1978b). The origins of English individualism: The family property and social transition. Wiley-Blackwell. MacFarlane, A. (1983). Man and the natural world. Retrieved from https://alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/naturalworld_thomas.pdf MacFarlane, A. (1987). The culture of capitalism. Blackwell. Massey, I. (1976). The gaping pig: Literature and metamorphosis. University of California Press. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. Routledge. Molander Danielsson, K. (2017). “And in that moment I leapt upon his shoulder”: Non-human intradiegetic narrators in The Wind on the Moon. Humanities, 6(2), 13–27. https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020013 Murris, K., & Bozalek, V. (2021). Intra-action. In A glossary for doing postqualitative, new materialist and critical posthumanist research across disciplines (pp. 70–71). Routledge. Parker, R. (1995). Torn in two: The experience of maternal ambivalence. Virago. Phoenix, A. (1987). Theories of gender and black families. In G. Weiner & M. Arnot (Eds.), Gender under scrutiny (pp. 50–61). Hutchinson. Phoenix, A. (1991). Young mothers? Polity. Pollack, L. (1983). Forgotten children: Parent-child relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge University Press. Poretti, M., Hanson, K., Darbellay, F., & Berchtold, A. (2014). The rise and fall of icons of ‘stolen childhood’ since the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Childhood, 21(1), 22–38. Rabello de Castro, L. (2021). Decolonising child studies: Development and globalism as orientalist perspectives. Third World Quarterly, 42(11), 2487–2504. Rabello de Castro, L., & Baraldi, C. (Eds.) (2020). Global childhoods in international perspective: Universality, diversity and inequalities. Sage. Riley, D. (1983). War in the nursery: Theories of mother and child. Virago. Rollo, T. (2018a). The color of childhood: The role of the child/human binary in the production of anti-Black racism. Journal of Black Studies, 49(4), 307–329. Rollo, T. (2018b). Feral children: Settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child. Settler Colonial Studies, 8(1), 60–79. Rose, N. (1985). The psychological complex. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism: Western concepts of the orient. Pantheon. Said, E. W. (2022). Travelling theory reconsidered. In Critical reconstructions (pp. 251–268). Stanford University Press. Schiff Berman, P. (1994). Rats, pigs and statues on trial: The creation of cultural narratives in the prosecution of animals and inanimate objects. NYU Review, 69, 288–326.

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Seshadri, K. (2012). HumAnimal: Race, law, language. University of Minnesota Press. Shuttleworth, S. (2013). The mind of the child: Child development in literature, science and medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford University Press. Soseki, N. (1906/1972). I am a cat (A. Ito & G. Wilson, Trans.). Tuttle. Steedman, C. (1995). Strange dislocations: Childhood and the idea of human interiority 1780–1939. Virago. Stengers, I. (2011). Comparison as a matter of concern. Common Knowledge, 17(1), 48–63. Stoler, A. L. (2001). Tense and tender ties: The politics of comparison in North American history and (post) colonial studies. Journal of American History, 88(3), 829–865. Stoler, A. L. (2005). Affective states. In D. Nugent & J. Vincent (Eds.), A companion to the anthropology of politics (pp. 4–20). Blackwell. Stoler, A. L. (2010). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. University of California Press. Strathern, M. (1992). After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Routledge. Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2019). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. Routledge. Walsh, S. (2010). Kipling’s children’s literature: Language, identity and constructions of childhood. Ashgate. Wells, K. (2007). Narratives of liberation and narratives of innocent suffering: The rhetorical uses of images of Iraqi children in the British press. Visual Communication, 6(1), 55–71. White, S. D.,  & Vann, R. T. (1983). The invention of English individualism: Alan Macfarlane and the modernization of pre-modern England. Social History, 8(3), 345–363. White, S., Edwards, R., Gillies, V.,  & Wastell, D. (2019). All the ACEs: A  chaotic concept for family policy and decision-making? Social Policy and Society, 18(3), 457–466. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press. Willis, D. (2018). Malevolent nurture. Cornell University Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Hate in the counter-transference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 69–74. Zelizer, V. A. (1994). Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children. Princeton University Press.

PART II

Interior Design

4 ANTIDEVELOPMENTALISM AND/IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Design is in fashion, academically, as a reflection of the geospatial turn in social theory, attending to the ways architectures reflect and constrain particular modes of relating. Space forms and shapes sociality – including forms of feeling – whether in terms of addiction-producing urban landscapes (layouts of high streets that incite people to gamble) (Jupp et  al., 2017; Jones et al., 2011; Pykett, 2012), or the ways housing policies (for example) enact racialised segregation and presume interracial hostilities (Garner  & Bhattacharyya, 2011). Childhood studies have also recently proposed engaging with ‘ontological design’ debates, as a way of centring theories and practices around children and childhoods around children as subjects, rather than as objects or policy instruments. A recent editorial for the journal Childhood suggests: ontological design can make us aware of the multiply enmeshed designs that constitute children’s subjectivities and encourage particular modes of being in the world, a worthy endeavor given childhood studies’ emerging interest in questions of ontology . . . ontological design may be enlisted in its affirmative capacity to explore possibilities for social change in which children take an active part in designing or co-designing the world. (Spyrou, 2022, p. 477) I will explicitly address the ontological turn in Part III of this book. However, along with object-oriented ontologies (sometimes abbreviated to OOO), there remains a need to formulate and evaluate what might be called subjectoriented ontologies. Psychoanalysis has long been acknowledged in social theory as a key resource for conceptualising the constitution of subjectivity DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-7

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through social relations and is sometimes seen as a critical tool to understand and undo developmentalist claims. Psychoanalysis also brings to the fore the work of relationships, as well as highlighting – at least for those willing to consider this – the material conditions in which such work takes place. This focus on work, on labour – its recognition and value – is important in intersectional ways, as feminist social reproduction theorists in particular have made clear (Federici, 2019; Bhattacharya, 2017). The gendering of care work (and teaching should perhaps be included in this) and its consequent (non)value demand particular focus – especially in relation to its racialised aspects and also the resources offered by Black feminist theorising (Thompson, 1998; hooks, 2014). In his Growing critical: alternatives to developmental psychology, John Morss (1996, p. 157) also pointed out how in discussions of childcare, the abstraction of development works as a forgetting of (another’s) labour: Babies are hard work. That work may or may not be “rewarding” or rewarded, and if unrewarded may well be invisible. One consequence of that work is what we call development. If the work is done by someone other than oneself, it may appear that the results of work are natural changes – the sort of natural changes we call development. A father might perhaps underestimate the work of a mother in this way. In the context of the school-aged child, both parents and teachers might “forget” each other’s work in a similar matter. Developmental explanation facilitates this forgetting: it explains away. Development could thus be defined as “someone else’s work”. By and large the someone else is female and in a bizarre alienating twist she may come to perceive even the results of her own work as merely natural. The ultimate accolade for a young mother would then be for an expert voice to confirm that her baby is “developing normally”. (emphasis original) Anticipating its further discussion in Chapter 6, Watson’s (1995) reinterpretation of the famous ‘fort/da’ game comes to mind, as an indication of cultural (over)determinations between patriarchy and development enacted in this description of a little boy’s early play. Watson comments on the description offered by Freud of his observations of his grandson: ‘The supporting role of the mother in turn falls to the silent, inanimate cotton reel, whose main function is simply to appear and disappear without protest’ (469), after which Freud offers his well-known speculations about mastery of anxiety generated by the mother’s absence and then revenge meted out upon the representation/ substitute he has made of her for doing this. At any rate, this example brings us back to my main concerns in this chapter, with psychoanalysis. For what Morss alludes to, in his comments earlier,

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is precisely the motivated forgetting that psychoanalysis tries to explain, as well as drawing attention to both the individual and societal functions – in this case, sanctioning indifference and devaluation via abstraction – that such forgetting plays. This is even as, in this example, psychoanalysis – as itself a cultural practice – also recapitulates exactly these dynamics, exemplifying how it reinscribes wider exclusionary and marginalising practices of development. Psychoanalysis: critic of developmentalist psychology or its ally?

The Introduction to this book offered as a key distinction the difference between developmentalist and non-developmentalist accounts. Since this Part II evaluates the status of psychoanalysis as an antidevelopmentalist resource, doing this necessarily includes attending to the resistances and struggles involved, not least from within psychoanalytic theories and practices themselves. To offer some context, psychoanalysis did get justifiably bad press from Anglo-US women’s movements of the 1970s, as offering psychologised explanations for oppressions and, on top of that, then blaming the victim (Millett, 1969). Then, Juliet Mitchell’s key text (originally published in 1974) proposed psychoanalysis as offering a reading of, rather than a prescription for, patriarchy (Mitchell, 2000), and an explosion of feminist engagement with ‘post-structuralist’ ideas engaging psychoanalytic analysis followed (e.g. Brennan, 1989; Gallop, 1992; Haug, 1990). Psychoanalysis became seen as an important political resource, complementing and amplifying the feminist claim that ‘the personal is political’. Specifically, at a time of great upheaval (in gender relations – at least in Euro-US contexts), psychoanalysis was seen as helping explain the relations between the psychic and the social. This included explaining (personal) resistance to (political) change; the (apparently) ‘internal’ obstacles that helped maintain social arrangements as they were, and block transformation (Zaretsky, 1976). It was from these wider shifts that, from the 1980s onwards, psychoanalysis was mobilised as a key resource in the Anglophone critical psychology and antidevelopmentalist repertoire, as Morss (1996) and others (Parker, 2001, 2013, 2014a, 2014b; Burman, 2013) note. The book Changing the Subject (Henriques et al., 1984), influenced by the translations into English of the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida that galvanised the ‘turn to the text’ in Anglophone critical social theory, inspired a generation of British critical psychologists and educationalists’ renewed engagement with psychoanalytic thinking. Psychoanalysis became heralded as an antinormative, critical, and even liberatory resource. Reviewing those debates some decades later, some further restatement of what is critical and useful about psychoanalysis, especially for critics of developmentalism is perhaps warranted. This is not least because of the diverse

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histories and relations between psychoanalysis and psychology in different parts of the world. If, in Anglophone contexts – especially those most aligned with behaviourism and then cognitivism – psychoanalysis could function as a mode of critique, this was precisely because its repudiation of mainstream Euro-US psychological approaches lent it some subversive potential (hence my claim in Deconstructing Developmental Psychology of ‘psychoanalysis as the repressed other of psychology’ (Burman, 2017, p. 181; and my mobilisation of it in Burman, 2020, 2021a, and elsewhere). However, psychoanalysis has also joined with, as much as undone, psychology in many parts of the world (including most Latin American contexts and in South Africa), including – significantly – to support psychology in its recruitment into projects of state violence and torture. This means that no intrinsic ‘left’ or critical impetus can be imputed to psychoanalysis (as also to psychology), outside of specific geopolitical contexts. Hence, insofar as psychoanalysis is critical, this criticality cannot be assumed as self-evident. Nor is it – as with any (psychoanalytic or nonpsychoanalytic) resource – immune from recuperation, from adaptation to and with prevailing social conditions. After all, the history of psychoanalysis itself inscribes such social imbrication – whether or how it became rendered into ego psychology in the flight from Nazism to the USA (Zaretsky, 2015; Jacoby, 1997) or the continuation of psychoanalysis under Nazism despite the expulsion and extermination of Jews in Germany (Frosh, 2005). Along with psychiatry, psychoanalysis proved a key apologist for colonialism, as Frantz Fanon consistently and vociferously pointed out throughout his writing (Fanon, 1952/1970, 1959/1965, 1961/1963; Khalfa & Young, 2018). The ‘forgetting’ of the free clinics set up to provide psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapies for individuals, couples, groups, adults and children without payment in Berlin, Budapest and Vienna is another example of the ways psychoanalysis has become presumed aligned with the ruling, capitalist order (see Danto, 2005). Yet there are many examples – both historical and current – of psychoanalysis being used as a way of resisting this order. From Marie Langer’s psychopolitical engagements in Argentina (Langer, 1989a, 1989b) to Brazilian psychoanalysts working in the favelas and with displaced indigenous peoples now (Katz et al., 2019; Lima, 2022), there are clear routes for psychoanalysts, as other committed mental health professionals, to do community-based, emancipatory practice. Aside from these examples, there are others where the engagement works in oppressive ways, as in the role of psychoanalysis as both sanitising and normalising the occupation of Palestine (Sheehi, 2018; Sheehi  & Sheehi, 2021), as well as the ways psychoanalysts remain divided on the question of transgender (Gherovici, 2011, 2017), and only relatively recently endorsed the training of publicly ‘out’ gay men and lesbians (O’Connor & Ryan, 1998).

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Key ‘critical’ elements attributed to psychoanalysis

It is worth briefly recalling why psychoanalysis is hailed as subversive of dominant social orders, or as a critical resource; and, further, what it is deemed to be critical of. I draw on many other authors to inform this account later (Parker, 1997, 2008, 2010, 2011; Frosh, 1997, 1999, 2010; Henriques et al., 1984). A key complicating factor is how Freud continually revised and complicated his own accounts, alongside producing a vast corpus of writing. His followers (broadly conceived) are even more diverse. Acknowledging this should perhaps set up the expectation of instability in his conceptualisations that allow for multiple and divergent readings. Many of the more recent critical psychologists, (including feminists) who have turned to psychoanalysis, have focused on Lacan’s re-readings of (or what he tendentiously called the ‘return to’) Freud (Grosz, 1990; Brennan, 1989). Both these figures – Freud (1966–1974) and Lacan (2006) – can, however, be read as both developmentalist and antidevelopmentalist theorists. It is therefore important to trace through how these readings connect and how they might be disentangled (if possible), or else their entanglements evaluated. Unconscious determination

The core concept of psychoanalysis must surely be the idea of the unconscious – that is, that actions and thoughts are in part motivated by factors that lie beyond conscious awareness. It is from this fundamental assumption that all other psychoanalytic tropes and concepts arise. What this brings is not a rejection of rationality but rather a sense of its fragility and limitations. That is, in some ways, psychoanalysis is a deeply rationalist (and correspondingly modernist) project – to better know oneself in order to lessen the power of these hidden impulses and drives. But, in other ways, it undermines dominant models of (stable, accessible) knowledge and truth. If people are driven by forces of which they are unaware, then no complete account of one’s actions can be made. There is a profound critique of total explanation here, of the possibility of knowing everything, of general knowledge (of the kind that positivist science claims), that chimes well with feminist, postcolonial and queer theory arguments about the partiality of knowledge, and the significance of cultural, gendered, classed and other geopolitical positionings – which have drawn extensively on psychoanalysis. Discussions of ‘fragility’ – whether in feminist or antiracist approaches (e.g. Applebaum, 2017; DiAngelo, 2018) alongside critical disability analyses of ableism as a defence against vulnerability and dependence (Watermeyer, 2012) – draw on psychoanalytic notions, whether acknowledged or not (for the antiracist educators many of these may come via Fanon’s psychoanalytical engagements throughout his writing, but especially in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon,

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1952/1970). A necessary tool for knowledge and knowing is via engagement with such exploration and acknowledgement of the unconscious, if only to know what it is that one is bringing to and what shapes one’s perspective and understanding. Psychoanalysis is a deeply reflexive discipline. It takes a subject to know a subject, one might say. I will return to this point later in this book as it features in the claims made for infant observation. The divided subject

What the acknowledgement of the role of the unconscious also brings is an understanding of the psyche as divided and in conflict. This is important for all critical theories, and especially in relation to evaluations of the mixed or ambivalent status of resistance, which may be both the cause of suffering but may also galvanise change both within and beyond the individual. Understanding and accepting contradiction is a fundamental step for understanding how such conflicts came about and what they mean. In this sense, psychoanalysis is radically different from humanist therapeutic (and Jungian) approaches which seek to find coherence, to make whole. From a psychoanalytic perspective, appealing to coherence risks pushing people back into what they were, rather than opening possibilities of what (else) they could become, which is of course an uncertain and open project. Notwithstanding many overlaps between humanistic and psychoanalytic approaches (not least in how the former rely on the latter for many of their major concepts and assumptions, such as identification), psychoanalytic approaches oppose a humanist project of becoming ‘who you really are’ (and so also firmly diverges from the ever expanding popular psychology genre of self-help). This is because it risks confirming the ‘self’ as it is, renders it static (even if accorded the status of ‘authenticity’) and so prevents, rather than enables, change. Hence, attempts at coherence import a sense of closure and either abstraction from sociality or, alternatively, adaptation to it. Adaptation is one of the accusations levelled at the ‘taming’ of psychoanalysis in its flight from Nazism as it travelled from Europe to the USA (Zaretsky, 2015; Jacoby, 1997), alongside its further institutionalisation as a medical-­ psychiatric specialisation there: To Lacan, the ego-psychologists were mistaken in their belief that helping patients to rebuild their egos could contribute to their overall adaptation to reality. In Lacan’s view, ego-building could only lead to further alienation and an even more hostile relation with the outside world. (Nobus, 1998, p. 123) Psychoanalysis in the USA has developed in ways that reflect the values and norms of that society, as Mitchell and Harris (2004) have acknowledged,

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including reflecting US pragmatism, optimism and a presumption of nature as benevolent, values which are different from Continental European varieties (among others). Lacanian-influenced psychoanalysts go further to emphasise the psychic and social value, as well as discomforts, of disadaptation, thereby elaborating Freud’s insights on the costs and compromises of becoming ‘civilised’ (which Fanon and Foucault also took up in different ways). It is from that disadaptation from prevailing social orders and norms, that is present from the outset in the species-specific prematurity of the human infant (Chiesa, 2007, 2009), that the impetus for change emerges, that is both individual and collective. It is also worth recalling Morss’ (1990) under-acknowledged discussion of the problem with the dominant reception of Darwin, and its significance for models of development. He argued that the focus on natural selection occluded the importance of variation, both of which are vital to evolutionary processes. Without variation, natural selection would in the end probably mean extinction. This connects with another important point to which I  will return: genuine development challenges (one’s own) knowledge and transforms it, rather than confirms it. This is why Vygotskyan and postVygotskyan discussions of development as both a tool and result are important (Newman, 1994; Hood & Newman, 2011). That is, development is a practice, not (only) a theory. This is also why disadaptation is so important. Against integration

Psychoanalysis is more than a set of techniques for impulse control or mentalisation. Even if a by-product of psychoanalytic explorations is to allow further integration of, in the sense of better tolerating conflicting desires, this is not its primary object – which is self-understanding. This status of integration is perhaps a key area of contestation between what might be called revolutionary and reformist versions of psychoanalysis (Parker  & Pavón-Cuéllar, 2021). Alongside this, is the question of the role of recognition and misrecognition. The less humanist readings of Freud (such as those by Lacan) emphasise the role of fantasy and other less conscious features driving identificatory processes and are suspicious of claims to authenticity or the idea of full or genuine recognition. Rather, desire is seen as based on a constitutive and irreparable split in the structure of the psyche in acceding to the symbolic order of (heteropatriarchal) language and culture (as in the name of the Father) and is unfulfillable. This is Lacan’s version of castration, the oedipal complex rendered cultural-symbolic. Feminist cultural theorists (e.g. Grosz, 1990) have read this as intimating the possibility that the symbolic order could be arranged otherwise even if Lacan was far from imagining this, since he understood castration and the Law of the Father as part of the human condition (Van Haute, 2012, is particularly clear on this). Yet his

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formulations also unseated (some) humans from their position at the top of the great chain of being, supporting different evolutionary-based readings such that ‘The notion of the struggle for life is in the end only an anthropocentric and implicitly teleological “political myth”: it conceals a racist bias that projects onto nature the preconception according to which the stronger race should win’ (Chiesa, 2009, pp. 98–99). Temporality not teleology: history as lived

Since psychoanalysis assumes a historical subject, one formed and shaped by experience as well as context and heritage, including genetic heritage, it is also constructionist. The subject may be determined by forces beyond their conscious understanding, but these forces are in part responses (of anxiety or panic, for example) to the challenges of living as an embodied, often (and especially in very early life) vulnerable and helpless being. Early experience is seen as influential, even formative, but the precise relationship with causality (i.e. what is formed) is unclear since this is mediated by the subject’s changing sensory and psychic response systems and structures, which in turn are also modified by these experiences. In that sense, psychoanalytic accounts attempt to straddle both psychic and social determinisms, which of course is also why Fanon was psychoanalytic in his sociogenic account (Fanon, 1952/1970). Again, the question of modifiability of the impacts of past experience and how this occurs is one of the key political points of tension between more and less developmentalist accounts. A key term in the developmentalist lexicon is that of ‘stage’, a concept widely elaborated from the late nineteenth century onwards to account for qualitative as well as quantitative change – in the sense that there is said to be some kind of coherence or logic governing each specific structural formation. Other ‘weaker’ terms used, such as phase or step, each carry their assumptions about duration or directionality. As many critics have pointed out, the psychosexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, and genital) of development associated with Freud in psychology (and other) textbooks were actually instituted as such by Karl Abraham. Freud’s own account saw these as unstable, even reversible, phases or forms of organisation but, nevertheless, this forms a key element in his model of the polymorphous perversity of the infant, aspects of which are held to persist throughout human psychic life. Stage is a ‘snarl’ word for critical childhood researchers, associated with a developmental psychology apparatus that is regarded as working to deny children access to their civil rights and portrays them as lacking. But it is important to remember that the notion of stage was initially formulated in order to accredit developing entities with increasing competence, rather than to confirm deficiencies. Irrespective of this, the notion of stage is clearly central to normative models, as successive entities are understood to replace

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each other en route to a singular endpoint. Yet this is not psychoanalytic, even if psychoanalytic writers sometimes implicitly complement or reiterate this position. When psychoanalysis is seen as largely concerned with correcting impediments to such development, fixations or stopping points, then it too is subscribing to developmentalist reasoning. Suspensions and deferrals: the role of narrative

Other features of psychoanalytic thinking transgress, reverse or otherwise challenge models of linear time. After all, thwarting the ‘repetition compulsion’ is one of its central concerns. Repetition is not developmental, or only minimally so (according to a Butlerian reading, e.g. Butler, 1990), insofar as the repetition is enacted in conditions that are forged anew for each iteration, and it is this slight variation that produces the possibility of change. Some form of repetition also underlies transference, as the reproduction of past patterns of relating and affectivity projected onto an other, or another context. This, too, is not necessarily aligned with a developmentalist model. Trauma, of course, suspends time. The dominant image of trauma is of the subject as caught in a reliving of painful experiences; that is, as fixed. Or in Fanon’s account of racialised trauma, petrified, ossified, or zombified (Fanon, 1952/1970, 1961/1963). From a developmental perspective, the subject needs to be freed from their traumatogenic ‘reminiscences’ to be able to ‘move on’, ‘work through’ etc. But, as various commentators have pointed out (Summerfield, 1999, 2004; Mills, 2016), this understanding of trauma itself already abstracts the identification and meaning of the trauma from the context in which it has been discovered or rather disclosed (Haaken, 1998; Burman, 1997a, 1997b): from the analytic encounter. Instead, both Freud, and especially Lacanian readings of Freud, have emphasised the role of deferred action, or Nachträglichkeit. Traumatic early experiences are only known about later, afterwards, and as narrated within the analytic session. They are narrative accounts, not observations. When they are talked about, and how, matters as much – in terms of meaning – as what is spoken about. This also means that what is traumatic and what this trauma means for the subject is uniquely to do with them. This remains true even where dramatic and awful experiences have occurred, which can be assumed to have a traumatic impact. Yet still its precise meaning for the subject cannot and should not be assumed. This reverses traditional conceptions of causality. Narrative and signification, not observation or empirical ‘reality’, come to the fore. Instead of a line of causality linking trauma, distress and symptoms, there is instead a process of telling and retelling, with the process of telling itself not simply rekindling but adding its own layering of meanings to the trauma being described.

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Psychoanalysis was named by an early patient (in fact Breuer’s patient, Anna O) as a ‘talking cure’. Language matters. So, rather than a project to return to try and put things right, or (as in early intervention projects) to try to prevent things from going wrong, the specifically psychoanalytic temporality is that of the anterior future, the future perfect. This tense form expresses a future action or event that will have been completed or have occurred before another future action (can) take place. The project is therefore not to try to discover what has been in order to explain what is, or to discover one’s truth in the past, but rather to arrive at the understanding that ‘the truth depends on the future, the nature of which is governed by one’s desire’ (Nobus, 1998, p. 122); that is, what one chooses to do with the understanding of that experience. This paradoxically opens up a radically different set of agentic possibilities that speak to the necessarily ethical project of psychoanalysis: ‘In other words, a human being is not determined by the past, but determines both the future and the past by the expression of his or her desire’ (Nobus, 1998, p. 122). It is no accident that the future anterior is seen as ‘women’s time’, for the envisaging of possible feminist futures (Jardine, 1981). As we shall see, this position also applies to some approaches to child analysis. Stavchansky (2018) ends her complex and compelling discussion of the place of the child in Lacanian psychoanalysis with a specific claim about temporality and agency: ‘if parents give live, life offers the interval and the distance, but existence is earned by the subject with his or her answer’ (136, emphasis original). Development as logical, not chronological or developmentalist

Even where Lacan seemed most tied to a developmentalist approach, as in his earliest work on the ‘mirror stage’, he was equivocal. Indeed, he explicitly shifted the term ‘stage’ to attend to its spatial rather than temporal meaning, as a (social and relational) arena. While initially presented as a quasi-natural, universal, chronological notion, Lacan reformulated the mirror stage in favour of his model of logical, rather than biological, time: Relying on this particular time-structure [the future anterior], which he also saw at work in the symbolic order, Lacan could no longer regard the mirror stage as a determinative ontological moment within a chronology of life-events, for the determination occurs retrospectively. In other words, the assumption, absence or disintegration of a “self-image” depends on an event that is posterior to the actual mirror experience. And since it is impossible to predict its meaning, it is useful to secure its occurrence within infantile development. (Nobus, 1998, p. 122) That is, we resort to the invoking of early experience as a ‘useful’ but potentially misleading shorthand way of referring to processes at play in the

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constitution of self-understanding. Lacan’s ‘logical time sophism’ (Lacan, 2006) also offers an account of apparently developmental stages, but these are logical rather than chronological. That is, the stages (or moments) are logically (rather than merely temporally) necessary for the next. They are also temporal, in that this logic relies on a physico-material sequence of embodied actions conducted in relation to others, that acquires its meaning through this sequence and so cannot be simultaneous. This makes it also a social time; in fact, a timeframe that ties the constitution of individual subjectivity to relationships with others as enacted within specific, spatiomaterial group encounters. As I have discussed elsewhere, this offers ways of thinking psychoanalysis and group analysis alongside each other, as well as re-embedding psychoanalysis within its socio-material contexts (Burman, 2021a, 2021b). So, to summarise. This chapter has addressed four issues. First, reflecting a child as method frame, it highlighted the cultural-political stakes in notions of development, including structuring individual subjectivities. Political projects of surveillance, regulation and oppression and liberation, alike, mobilise models of social–individual relations that typically invoke stories of children and childhood. Second, it distinguished between developmental and developmentalist accounts, where the latter resort to descriptions of individual and child development as a means of accounting for (problems within) current social arrangements. The question of development therefore remains an open one, that needs to be shed of the trappings of developmentalisms of various kinds. Third, some contingent but socio-politically significant relations between psychology and psychoanalysis were identified, that have produced forms of psychoanalytic reasoning that have been taken up as antidevelopmentalist resources. Finally, these key antidevelopmentalist elements were reviewed, including unconscious determination, the divided subject, why integrating the self is seen as inadequate, a focus on temporality rather than teleology in order to attend to history as lived out within socio-material contexts, and, finally, the importance of narrative, including narrative suspensions and deferrals, in elaborating accounts of personal history and especially of traumatic experience. Together, these add up to a model of development seen as logical, rather than chronological or developmentalist. Having identified these interpretive resources for antidevelopmentalist accounts, the following chapters address how this impulse is thwarted or fails to be realised, for significant reasons. References Applebaum, B. (2017). Comforting discomfort as complicity: White fragility and the pursuit of invulnerability. Hypatia, 32(4), 862–875. Bhattacharya, T. (Ed.). (2017). Social reproduction theory: Remapping class, recentering oppression. Pluto Press. Brennan, T. (Ed.). (1989). Between feminism and psychoanalysis. Routledge.

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Burman, E. (1997a). False memories, true hopes: Revenge of the postmodern on therapy. New Formations, 30, 122–134. Burman, E. (1997b). Telling stories: Psychologists, children and the production of false memories. Theory & Psychology, 7(3), 291–309. Burman, E. (2013). Desiring development? Psychoanalytic contributions to antidevelopmental psychology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(1), 56–74. Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). Routledge. Burman, E. (2020). Developments: Child, image, nation. Routledge. Burman, E. (2021a). Lockdown vistas: Time, space, solidarity, action. In I. Strasser & M. Dege (Eds.), The psychology of global crises and crisis politics – Intervention, resistance (pp. 189–212). Springer/Palgrave Macmillan. Burman, E. (2021b). Fanon and revolutionary group praxis. Group Analysis. https:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/05333164211001192 Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. Routledge. Chiesa, L. (2007). Subjectivity and otherness: A philosophical reading of Lacan. MIT Press. Chiesa, L. (2009). The world of desire: Lacan between evolutionary biology and psychoanalytic theory. Filozofski vestnik, XXX(2), 83–112. Danto, E. A. (2005). Freud’s free clinics. Columbia University Press. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press. Fanon, F. (1952/1970). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Paladin. Fanon, F. (1959/1965). A dying colonialism (H. Chevalier, Trans.). Grove. Fanon, F. (1961/1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Penguin. Federici, S. (2019). Social reproduction theory. Radical philosophy, 2(4), 55–57. Frosh, S. (1997). For and against psychoanalysis. Routledge. Frosh, S. (1999). The politics of psychoanalysis (2nd ed.). Macmillan. Frosh, S. (2005). Hate and the ‘Jewish science’: Anti-semitism, Nazism and psychoanalysis. Palgrave. Frosh, S. (2010). Psychoanalysis outside the clinic: Interventions in psychosocial studies. Bloomsbury Publishing. Gallop, J. (1992). Feminisms and psychoanalysis: The daughter’s seduction. Macmillan. Garner, S., & Bhattacharyya, G. (2011). Place, ethnicity and poverty in England. JRF Programme Paper, Joesph Rowntree. Gherovici, P. (2011). Please select your gender: From the invention of hysteria to the democratizing of transgenderism. Routledge. Gherovici, P. (2017). Transgender psychoanalysis: A Lacanian perspective on sexual difference. Routledge. Grosz, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction. Routledge. Haaken, J. (1998). Pillar of salt: Gender, memory and the perils of looking back. Free Association Books. Haug, F. (1990). Beyond female masochism. Verso. Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Couze, V., & Walkerdine, V. (1984). Changing the subject. Routledge. Hood, L.,  & Newman, F. (2011). Tool and results: Understanding, explaining and meaning (three sides of the dialectical coin). In I. Parker (Ed.), Critical psychology, Vol. IV alternatives and visions for change (pp. 41–76). Routledge.

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hooks, b. (2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. Jacoby, R. (1997). Social amnesia: A critique of contemporary psychology. Routledge. Jardine, A. (1981). Introduction to Julia Kristeva’s “Women’s Time”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7(1), 5–12. Jones, R., Pykett, J.,  & Whitehead, M. (2011). Governing temptation: Changing behaviour in an age of libertarian paternalism. Progress in Human Geography, 35(4), 483–501. Jupp, E., Pykett, J., & Smith, F. M. (Eds.) (2017). Emotional states. Sites and spaces of affective governance. Routledge. Katz, I., Dunker, C. I. L., & de Novaes Rezende, R. (2019). Care clinic on the banks of the Xingu river. Recherches en psychanalyse, 27(1), 49a-58a. Khalfa, J.,  & Young, R. J. (Ed.) (2018). Alienation and freedom: Frantz Fanon. Bloomsbury. Lacan, J. (2006). Ecrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). WW Norton & Company. Langer, M. (1989a). Psychoanalysis without the couch. Free Associations, 1(15), 60–66. Langer, N. (1989b). From Vienna to Managua: Journey of a psychoanalyst. Free Associations Books. Lima, F. F. (2022). Clínicas sociais corporalistas no Brasil: A construção de novos dispositivos clínicos/Corporalist social clinics in Brazil: The construction of new clinical devices. Revista Latino-Americana De Psicologia Corporal, 9(14), 87–100. Millett, K. (1969). Sexual politics. Columbia University Press. Mills, C. (2016). Mental health and the mindset of development. In J. Grugel & D. Hammett (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of international development (pp. 535– 553). Palgrave. Mitchell, J. (2000). Psychoanalysis and feminism: A radical reassessment of Freudian psychoanalysis. Basic Books. Mitchell, S. A., & Harris, A. (2004). What’s American about American psychoanalysis? Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14(2), 165–191. Morss, J. R. (1990). The biologising of childhood: Developmental psychology and the Darwinian myth. Routledge. Morss, J. R. (1996). Growing critical: Alternatives to developmental psychology. Routledge. Newman, F. (1994). Let’s develop! Castillo International. Nobus, D. (Ed.). (1998). Key concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Rebus. O’Connor, N., & Ryan, J. (1998). Wild desires and mistaken identities: Lesbianism and psychoanalysis. Virago. Parker, I. (1997). Psychoanalytic culture: Psychoanalytic discourse in Western society. Sage. Parker, I. (2001). Lacan, psychology and the discourse of the university. Psychoanalytic Studies, 3(1), 67–77. Parker, I. (2008). Japan in analysis: Cultures of the unconscious. Springer. Parker, I. (2010). Lacanian psychoanalysis: Revolutions in subjectivity. Routledge. Parker, I. (2011). Psychoanalytic mythologies. Anthem Press. Parker, I. (2013). Discourse analysis: Dimensions of critique in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 10(3), 223–239. Parker, I. (2014a). Psychology after Lacan: Connecting the clinic and research. Routledge.

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Parker, I. (2014b). Psychology after the unconscious: From Freud to Lacan. Routledge. Parker, I., & Pavón-Cuéllar, D. (2021). Psychoanalysis and revolution: Critical psychology for liberation movements. 1968 Press. Pykett, J. (2012). The new maternal state: The gendered politics of governing through behaviour change. Antipode, 44(1), 217–238. Spyrou, S. (2022). When design designs children: The importance of ontological design for childhood studies. Childhood, 29(4), 471–477. Sheehi, L., & Sheehi, S. (2021). Psychoanalysis under occupation: Practicing resistance in Palestine. Routledge. Sheehi, S. (2018). Psychoanalysis under occupation: Nonviolence and dialogue initiatives as a psychic extension of the closure system. Psychoanalysis and History, 20(3), 353–369. Stavchansky, L. (2018). Lacanian psychoanalysis between the child and the other: Exploring the cultures of childhood. Routledge. Summerfield, D. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science & Medicine, 48(10), 1449–1462. Summerfield, D. (2004). Cross-cultural perspectives on the medicalization of human suffering. In G. M. Rosen (Ed.), Post-traumatic stress disorder: Issues and controversies (pp. 233–245). Wiley. Thompson, A. (1998). Not the color purple: Black feminist lessons for educational caring. Harvard Educational Review, 68(4), 522–555. Van Haute, P. (2012). Against adaptation: Lacan’s subversion of the subject. Other Press, LLC. Watermeyer, B. (2012). Towards a contextual psychology of disablism. Routledge. Watson, J. (1995). Guys and dolls: Exploratory repetition and maternal subjectivity in the fort/da game. American Imago, 52(4), 463–503. Zaretsky, E. (1976). Capitalism, the family and personal life. Harper & Row. Zaretsky, E. (2015). Political Freud: A history. Columbia University Press.

5 CULTURAL-IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS OF NEW (AND OLD) DEVELOPMENTALISMS

Cultural-ideological pressures incite and fuel the demand for developmentalist accounts. While Chapter  4 discusses the status of psychoanalysis as a resource to evaluate the ‘desire for’ development, this chapter considers cultural-political contexts and associated technological and policy agendas driving desires for developmentalism. The critical features identified earlier within psychoanalysis are shown to become easily eclipsed by these cultural and political reformulations. I review indicative examples, evaluating the persuasive power of ‘science’, exemplified by neuroscience, in particular attending to the cultural-political embeddedness of developmentalist discourse and its relationship to new technologies, especially brain and ultra-sonar imaging. Yet there are also useful discussions prompting reinterpretation and resistance to dominant mobilisations. Holding such critiques in mind helps identify the key spatio-temporal compressions at play, especially evident in reformulations of attachment theory, that elide, occlude and enact prevailing cultural and political agendas. In this, narrative transpositions of the popular for the technical come to play a significant role. Thus, Child as method both exemplifies and extends David Harvey’s (1989) analysis of ‘postmodernity’, demonstrating how child and appeals to child development – and its attributed futurities and efficacies – operate as intensifications of the individualisation and the foreclosure of the social in late capitalism. Analyses of the temporal and spatial malleabilities enabling this developmentalist cultural politics help inform how and why poor, minoritised and non-normative communities are so pathologised within recent applications of attachment theory, especially via claims to neuroscience informing early intervention programmes and adverse child experiences (ACEs). Transpositions of claims made for research are shown to migrate DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-8

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from technical to political domains, acquiring a spurious solidity and reality characteristic of current post-truth and ‘fake news’ times. In terms of guiding frameworks, the Child as method analysis here draws on and shows its alignment to feminist and queer theory and critical disability studies as key interpretive resources for antidevelopmentalism, as well as its debt to social studies of science, including psychologisation. While the domain of the interpersonal and the intrapsychic appears displaced to the neurological, enacted via the dynamic of compression of the biography of the subject (from child to infant to prenatal experience and even conception) to foretell sometimes dire consequences, the chapter highlights some indications of how these dramatic (and probably untenable) claims are also being subtly displaced and warded off. Spectacular speculations: back to bonding

De Vos (2017) takes the rise of online parenting sites as an index of the constructive powers of the discourse of the digital, as aligned with the neuropsychological, in an era of intensified psychologisation. The problem with (neuro)psychological explanations, he suggests, is not that they are wrong, but rather that they acquire reality because of the ways our lifeworld has itself become constituted by the virtual realm. This not only conflates the two different domains of the intersubjective and the subjective but also institutes a new status and temporality for psychological explanation, from being retrospectively inferred on the basis of documented observations to be transferred onto (supposedly) directly contemporaneous images. In this temporal elision, the role of interpretation on the part of the observer is made to disappear through the apparently ‘obvious’ and direct medium of digital technologies (see also Thornton, 2011). De Vos points out: in pre-digital times (social) psychology was deduced post-factum (with experiments and questionnaires). It was surmised, hypothesised, if not fantasised. As now (inter)subjectivity is given form within the virtual environment based on neuropsychological theories and models, (social) psychology is made ‘real’. (33) It is attachment theory that has both enthusiastically driven (with some wily interpretive footwork, see Burman, 2017 and below) and benefitted from this neuropsychological turn, whereby, as De Vos (2017, p. 34) puts it: attachment is claimed to be made tangible by digital brain-imaging techniques, or psychological speculations made substantial by fleshing them out via brain scans. But the true substantialisation is the ensuing one: that

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is the biopolitical realization of the mainstream card-board psychologies via the digitization of everyday life. The rest of this chapter addresses the cultural politics of this ‘biopolitical realization of the mainstream card-board psychologies via the digitization of everyday life’, starting with the widespread take-up of technologies visualising the foetus, discussing the social and affective as well as healthcare practices these have spawned, as well as policy inscriptions. Narrative transpositions of popular account substituting for scientific, empirical research are identified as operating powerfully in the service of neoliberal agendas that conveniently miniaturise sociopolitical issues onto the youngest of humans: the child/foetus, its care and even its conception. Foetus gazing: where technical expertise meets popular culture

The last decades have seen an explosion of scanning technologies applied to healthcare and beyond. The rise of ultrasound scanning has made possible early detection of foetal abnormalities or other problems with pregnancy. In addition, the practice of producing a visually mediated encounter with the unborn yet-to-be child has been seen to offer opportunities for research connecting therapeutic with other cultural and political considerations. Routine ultrasound scanning is undertaken by pregnant women in most middleincome countries. This has prompted the extension of research, including psychoanalytic research, into pre-birth investigation. For example, an early study by Piontelli (1992) claims to analyse relations between foetal ‘observations’ (from ultrasound imagery) and reported sensations from the mother. She presents her claims alongside both research and clinical work with some of those same babies and children whose pre-birth ultrasounds she witnessed, thus combining therapeutic psychoanalytic with scientific claims. She reports striking continuities and consistencies between foetal characteristics observed from the ultrasounds (of, e.g. activity levels, ‘preferences’ for space or proximity inferred from how the foetus positioned itself and moved in the womb) and those she later observed in the child (notably, her sample also included several pairs of twins). It is interesting to note how, in this early psychoanalytic engagement with ultrasound technology, knowledge claims are carefully qualified, with the study described in the Editorial Preface to the book as not ‘really’ scientific, as ‘preliminary and descriptive’ (Bott Spillius, 1992, p. X), and as framed by the researcher’s affective responses and interpretations. (Acknowledging the role of interpretation here is of course especially important, given the ways the analyst/ researcher’s retrospection and prospection interact in such studies.) Nevertheless, one of the key positive points put forward from this carefully framed account is that, even as the later observations are informed by

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earlier ones, and the author acknowledges the history of involvement arising from the longitudinal nature of this kind of study, such work nevertheless is seen to offer an improvement on earlier psychoanalytic understandings of the pre-birth, foetal period which had until then only been retrospective (and – presumably – as narrated by the analysand, rather than the analyst, which marks another key shift). As if to ward off criticism of (what in another domain might be called) confirmation bias, Piontelli instead emphasises how surprised she is by the continuities (of behavioural patterning and emerging interpersonal dynamics and personality features) she identifies between ultrasound images and maternal experiences and baby-child qualities, and they perhaps they do offer food for thought to therapists. This kind of work is reflected in further developments that have turned ultrasound technologies into a form of advanced attachment-based interventions. Jussila et al.’s (2021) study is indicative, if also interesting for failing to demonstrate any therapeutic impact from a randomised controlled trial (RCT) experiment. Indeed, notwithstanding its tenuous basis, Piontelli is drawn to consider how best to account for the young children she worked with psychoanalytically via invoking some kind of notion of unconscious experience: I think it unlikely that they could consciously or coherently recollect the events of their past, but they seemed at the very least unable to ‘repress’ or ‘forget’ some of the sensations belonging to such a past, and this fact seemed to have hampered their movement forwards, towards life. Most of these seemed in fact stuck in a weird re-edition of an incongruous past. (237) It should be recalled that Piontelli is here referring to children she has worked with clinically, moreover, whose antenatal history she was already acquainted with. It should also be recalled that claims of pre-birth experiences are also based on parental accounts. Interpretational complexities are rife. If this early study connecting neuroscience and psychoanalysis struggles to maintain nuance and interpretive clarity, later work – especially in the domains of popular culture and policy – ride roughshod over such considerations. Practices of new technologies surrounding pregnancy and birth thus link medicine, psychology and the social. This is particularly evident in the rise of the commercial scanning sector which, in the name of empowering women and promoting communication between pregnant woman and her child-tobe, ‘recasts them as consumers of information about their foetuses rather than as the sources of that information’ (Fraser, 2016, p. 58). To offer some indicative characterisations, Stephenson et  al. (2016) discussed the moral ambiguity of ultrasound as, on the one hand, offering a potentially creative space between medical and nonmedical), but also cautioning that all too

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often this works to disempower pregnant women, while Frost and Haas (2017) took this analysis further to highlight how such technologies intensify already existing dynamics of the colonising of women’s bodies. Indeed, Thomas (2017) suggested that the rise of scanning as a commercial practice displaces the ultrasound from being a technology of diagnosis, indeed one requiring particular expertise for interpretation, into being an event purchased by parents for their entertainment, so intensifying the commodification of women’s bodies and familial relations. Further, Roberts (2016) points to how this renders such women participants in the forging of a relationship with the foetus only via their spectatorship, as well as constituting a new semiotic repertoire of normalised, including racialised, techno-foetuses that also further marginalises and demonises abortion. This latter consideration demands a significant pause, to reflect on the prescience of this analysis in the context of more recent challenges to abortion provision in the USA, and elsewhere. The ec-static child

Amid all the hype generated by technology, what typically remains less (if at all) considered is the constructed and interpretive status of the ultrasound, and the problems of treating the sonographic image as if it were a photograph. Yet, as Cannon (2014) notes, the child that is made visible from a representation of prenatal space reflects and consolidates culturally normative models of the ideal child that extends chronologically backwards to before birth. Cannon discusses images reproduced from a rather bizarre iPhone-hosted app called Pimp My Ultrasound which shows, for example, a print with the imaged foetus sporting a reversed baseball cap (sometimes colloquially and derogatively called an ‘IQ reducer’) on its head, a ball hovering above it and a bat below, the entire image glossed with the title ‘future athlete’. The website claims its aim is to ‘make sure the image-based posts you share on social media leading up to (and even after) the birth of your child is unique and stands out among all the other baby-related content currently flooding your friends’ newsfeeds’ (https://www.trendhunter.com/ trends/baby-photo-editing), so clarifying its address to a major Internet genre (and market). There is also an equivalently gendered address to the mother-to-be: Pregnant, and just can’t wait to play dress ups with your baby?. Now you can style your unborn child with Pimp My Ultrasound. This iPhone app lets you include fun accessories like a tiara, baseball cap, sunglasses, a credit card, and even a martini glass (!) on your ultrasound photo. (https://www.foxinflats.com.au/2012/03/ ultrasound-iphone-app/)

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As Cannon comments: ‘A yet-to-be-born child can be the greatest and most successful because, as with any differential logic, these fantasies and desires operate outside of measurable, quantifiable standards for differentiation’ (272). Via engagement with Barthesian discussions of studium and punctum (Barthes, 1981) and queer theory, Cannon explores the construction of and limits to (including the exclusion of) representations of young people’s non-normative sexualities in film, using these to inform discussion of the suppressed acknowledgement of the material process of producing ultrasound images. Recall that all this wild indulgence of culturally sanctioned fantasies occurs because the image produced by an ultrasound monitor is in fact an artefact produced via the stabilisation of multiple movements of sound waves (the ultrasounds) into pixels on a screen that are then visually ‘seen’ or ‘read’. This indirect, interpretive process introduces constitutive ambiguity into the ultrasound image: for inasmuch as such images produce meaning, meaning also escapes ‘. . . making this an intrinsically unstable space where pictorial representations are affected and queered by images before they have the possibility to become rendered into meaningful visible surfaces’ (Cannon 278). Cannon designates this inside–outside character as ec-static as both generated by but also beyond the visuo-spatial. Attending to this ec-static status of avisuality potentially promotes awareness of the fragility of the attributed meanings accorded the foetal photographs and so questions the security of, for example, presumed and anticipated heteronormativity. Queering developmentalism

Queer theory works here to highlight and decentre normative assumptions around gender and sexuality and is a key antidevelopmentalist resource for the consideration of children and development, with its subversion of dominant discourses that presume a specific directionality of growth (as in ‘growing up’). This is done through formulating other ways of describing developmental trajectories, such as ‘growing sideways’ (Stockton, 2009; Gill-Peterson et al., 2016), as well as critiquing the ways the futurity signified by the child presumes and naturalises heterosexed reproductivity (Edelman, 2004). A further critical interpretive resource is critical disability studies. This has revived an early engagement with psychoanalytic ideas (Marks, 1999), in its attention to non-normative modes of embodiment and desire (Shildrick, 2019), alongside the refusal (as well as impossibility, perhaps) of being recruited into a progressivist narrative of ‘getting better’. Moreover, such ableist discourses bolster forms of ablenationalism that parallel homonationalism (the latter meaning the recruitment of gay men and lesbians into national identity and political economy projects), as has also long been the case with and for women via such heteronormative reproductive imperatives (Sifaki et al., 2022).

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Significantly, queer theory has – since its inception – been very engaged with psychoanalysis, with Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble in many respects devoted to a radical reformulation of psychoanalysis to turn around the ways the sex/gender binary has been understood since second-wave feminism. Other key figures in queer theory have drawn on psychoanalysis to motivate alternative interpretive practices; notably, Sedgwick (1990) mobilises Kleinian theory in her discussion of ‘reparative reading’ to counter ‘paranoid’ modes of academic criticism, so highlighting the ethical character of academic practice. Psychoanalytic ideas also inform queer theory’s discussions of temporality (Freeman, 2018). Indeed Wiegman (2014) noted that ‘in queer feminist criticism time itself has become a reparative affect’ (14), since it supports ‘cultivating a response to the conditions of the political present, one that simultaneously embraces ambivalence, rejects the demands of progress, and forgoes the dominance of the symptom as the organising agency of criticism’ (16). As indicated earlier, critical disability studies have also vigorously countered what Puar (2009) termed ‘prognosis time’, while engagements between queer and postcolonial critiques mobilise psychoanalytic perspectives to extend their analytic purchase on theories of affect (Muñoz, 2006). Having outlined this conceptual background, let us return to Cannon’s (2014) discussion of the ultrasound. The term ec-static describes the instability of the visual image of the foetus that emerges from ultrasound scans, in producing a static picture out of something which is originally not visual but sonar, the oscillations of sound waves. This suggestive designation imports further resonances for consideration. In particular, it invites speculation about the hazy or nuanced, or even potentially rejected or abjected, status of the foetusas-yet-to-be-born-child, whose trajectory into life, let alone into becoming the ‘future athlete’ to confirm this envisaged future, is in fact as yet tenuous and, indeed, far from assured. Rather, the jokey title (Pimp My Ultrasound) can be heard as already suggesting a socially recognised insecurity (and perhaps even impropriety?) about the foetus’ status (remember that jokes always address arenas of shared social anxiety, as Freud, 1905/1976, highlighted), that also therefore implicitly acknowledges multiple possible outcomes lying outside normative expectations. Cannon is suggesting, here, that this is how the ultrasound image works. For notwithstanding, or perhaps precisely because of, the grotesquery of the heteronormative performances it invites, the putative child-to-be is queered. This queering can be read both in the semiotics of the ‘dressed up’ images, but also in the material production of the image itself, in forging what can only be provisional, unstable representations from a shifting sonar array. In addition, Cannon proposes that this avisual, ecstatic character also alludes to modes of affect, including pleasures, that lie outside dominant normative cultural practices. Further, as a description of the child-as-yet-to-be, the foetal image, the notion of the ec-static recalls another inside-outside complex relation: Lacan’s notion of ‘extimacy’ (combining the

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notion of intimacy with a sense of what lies outside, or is exterior to, signification), that I have drawn upon elsewhere to qualify a more adequate account of childhood agentic participation (Burman, 2019). The intrapsychic displaced to the neurological

Such uncertainties and ambiguities are very far from the public image of the status of early experience, where psychedelic images of individual baby and even foetal brains abound. In the UK, such claims informed major ‘All Party’ Parliamentary policy documents of the first decades of the twentyfirst century that made explicit claims about the role of child development in state economic development. The two (so-called) Allen Reports of 2011, for example (Allen, 2011a, 2011b), exemplify neoliberal governmentality in inscribing explanations for economic inequalities into familial and community relationships. While this is not new, the neuroscientific rationale institutes what historians and cultural theorists of science, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, note to be a ‘changed concept of poverty . . . guaranteed to appeal to a government committed to privatisation and the small state’ (Rose & Rose, 2016). The actual investment in services and support seems to be in inverse proportion to the pages written. The first Allen report Early intervention: the next steps https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/284086/early-intervention-next-steps2. pdf extends to a whopping 179 pages, and its successor https://www.gov. uk/government/publications/early-intervention-smart-investment-massivesavings, published later the same year, is not much shorter at 149 pages. At least the ‘Educated brain policy brief’ (published from Cambridge University), publicising an ESRC-supported research seminar series of 2016–2017 addressing ‘Infancy and Early Childhood, Late Childhood and Adolescence, and Effectively translating neuroscience for teaching practice’, runs to only 24 pages (https://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/educatedbrain/assets/docs/ Seminar1_PolicyBrief.pdf). The full repertoire of elements warranting the appeal to neuroscience is evident in both Allen Reports. This includes critical periods, claims about brain growth, numbers of synapses, and stress and cortisol levels. Attachment theory, with its focus on the child–primary caregiver relationship (does there really have to be a ‘primary’ caregiver?) is foregrounded. Rose and Rose (2016) evaluate the claims made for the neuroscience cited in these potent policy documents. Specifically, they trace the origins of the MRI scan images supposedly depicting ‘normal’ and ‘neglected’ child brains to images from a paper posted on the website of a US-based organisation, the Child Trauma Academy (which is not an academic outfit). Importantly, the authors of this original paper have retracted any such claims as unreliable and unsubstantiatable (which is why this paper remained unpublished). Yet, like ultrasound

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images, it seems that the bewitching fascination of the images trumps critical reflection and evaluation. In the same paper, Rose and Rose (2016) also cast doubt on the claims about ‘toxic stress’, which are based on the measurement of cortisol levels. They note that this is a complex matter to determine, given difficulties of establishing equivalence across populations, in relation to individual diurnal rhythm variation as well as normal variation across different populations, and so cannot sustain the arguments put forward. They conclude: ‘The alarmist claims about rates of brain growth, synapse numbers, sensitive periods and cortisol levels are at best a bridge too far, at worst reliant on ideologicallydriven, bad or over-interpreted science’ (np). But even as the apparent truth claims around ‘the science’ fragment, Rose and Rose conclude of the Allen reports: ‘Missing is any recognition of the structural links between a globalised capitalism and intensifying inequality’ (ibid.). Or even more bluntly, as the subtitle of Penn’s (2017) chapter (discussing international policies on early childcare and education) puts it: ‘anything to divert attention from poverty’ (54). Together, this set of policy imperatives, that tie children’s welfare and support into childcare and push this to ever earlier and supposedly irreversibly important life periods, instigates ‘a neurobiological-economic nexus in which childhood is merely the preamble of adult productivity in a meritocratic society’ (Vandenbroek, 2017, p. 13). Local to global inequalities and disenfranchisements, but some equivocations

Significantly, Penn (2017) also highlights a number of other important political consequences of this model, including how it warrants the overlooking of global economic disparities and inequalities, and both legitimises and scientifically reifies economic individualism. This extends into cultural hegemony and racism in the failure to attend to indigenous practices and variations in cultural norms in favour of imposing Western ‘scientifically-based’ policies around play-based interventions. As she puts it, such interventions just can’t work in ‘societies where play is differently understood and rarely adultinitiated, and activities such as shared reading with young children in poor communities where household books are unknown or unavailable and illiteracy rates are high’ (61). Indeed, rather than attending to local modes of cultural expression, as well as culturally specific inter-and intra-generational relations, policy proposals are simplistic, impracticable and under-resourced (see also Penn, 2010). Significantly, Penn (2017) suggests such simplified proposals function as a warrant for such under-resourcing: Any indigenous ideas or assumptions about childrearing – for example about child-to-child activities, or about the participation of children in the

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work life of their families, or about multi-lingualism, or about dance or art as a means of expression, or about spiritual well-being – all the many facets of cultural diversity and richness are simply ignored. Instead the interventions are mostly low cost and home-based, and are crude in their assumptions about the nature of stimulation or about the material possessions families are likely to have. (Penn 61) De Vos (2014, 2015, 2020) also points out how those psychotherapists who have embraced the neuroturn and attempted to recruit it to support their own cause (to promote psychotherapy) may have succeeded in proscribing their own domain of inquiry. For so compelling and determining are the descriptions of neurophysiology and its biochemistry that there actually seems little left of the psychological as such. Specifically, De Vos (2014) highlights a particular paradox arising from brain imaging: that even as these images are understood to demonstrate human materiality, by virtue of their digital and virtual status ‘. . . rather than mediating between us and our material self, they actually draw us into virtuality’ (De Vos, 2014, p. 5). What this gives rise to is disembodiment, rather than embodiment, as well as interpellating the viewer into the academic-policy gaze, so objectifying (and alienating) ourselves even more from specific, material contexts. This political dynamic can be seen at work even when (as I explore in the next section) the brain images come to play a less direct visual role within policy rhetoric. For now, let us note (as is the case also with revisions of psychoanalytic approaches discussed in Chapter 6) two key points: first, the interpersonal has replaced the intrapsychic, such that even if the neuroscience is presented as evidence of environmental influence, rather than despite it, this still miniaturises the sociopolitical into and as parent–child interaction; second, this interpersonal has in fact – via its virtualisation and digitisation – been stripped of its psychological status, even as explicit psychologising and pedagogical policy imperatives (around child stimulation, involvement, etc.) have escalated. A final equivocation around neuroscience is worth noting in more recent child mental health literature addressing ‘lay’ readers. It seems that the neuroscientific claims, presumed accurate and uncontested, are now deemed necessary to acknowledge. However, the remaining discussion shifts rapidly from a discussion of hormones (e.g. cortisol) and brain structures (the amygdala etc.) supposedly involved in anxiety and trauma, to a concern with children’s minds and mental life, and the role of professionals and parents in supporting this. That is, once presented, the precise relationship of this neuroscientific material to the rest of the discussion remains curiously unspecified and actually irrelevant to the proposed recommendations. This ambivalent treatment – obligatory citation but then disregard – seems to be

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quite widespread. An indicative example is Hickman’s (2021) advice, produced on behalf of the Climate Psychology Alliance for the Schools Climate Summit during L ­ ondon Climate Action Week (June 2021), on dealing with children’s ‘climate anxiety’. The same motif is present in Rachel Burr’s (2022) accessible and supportive parent and professional handbook on Self-worth in children and young people. In both accounts, neuroscience is cited but effectively relegated to a merely decorative function, ancillary to the substantive arguments made in the texts which actually concern interactive and therapeutic strategies, that in fact are relevant and applicable irrespective of the neuroscience. Whether this strategy can be regarded as one of acquiescence or resistance to the neuroturn, that is, whether paying lip service to or subscribing to, or – a­ lternatively – sidelining it, is unclear. 1,001 days: biographical developmental compression and its cultural regression

In terms of official policy documents, the UK Allen Reports were followed in 2013 by a further cross-party Parliamentary policy manifesto, 1,001 Critical Days (Leadsom et al., 2013) – another nearly 150-page document full of claims about critical periods (and endorsed by the NSPCC in its own shorter version), with promises of extending the ‘Start for Life offer’ to children and families. Yet (as with the international policies discussed by Penn, 2017, earlier) this ‘offer’ seems to be more about regulation, data gathering and inspection, rather than providing new resources or services. Indeed, the discourse of ‘offers’ is a twenty-first-century innovation, which marks the further incursion of neoliberal discourse into governmental policy. Rather than ensuring – or even claiming to try to ensure – take-up of welfare support, the onus is put on the individual to manage to access this. It marks a key political shift from entitlement to support as a voluntary, discretionary resource, dependent on the labour and cultural capital of the individual to know how to navigate systems. It might also be noted that, as a speech act, ‘offer’ is a fairly weak formulation, compared, say to ‘promise’ or ‘guarantee’, or even ‘provide’. Significantly, these ‘1,001 days’ were identified as spanning the period from conception to age two, rather than, as was previously elaborated, the first three years of life. So thresholds for adequate development have been pushed back ever earlier. By 2021 the new UK government document The best start for life: a vision for the 1001 critical days, softens the ‘critical’ claims to ‘unique’ in its online gloss (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-best-start-for-life-avision-for-the-1001-critical-days). Perhaps also noteworthy is that the politicians fronting this glossy document (Matt Hancock and Angela Leadsom, as health and social care, and education ministers, respectively) departed fairly quickly from these posts. At any rate, this report, basically a 10-year

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follow-up on the earlier Allen reports, appeared without much fanfare (I was certainly not aware of it before discovering it online when writing this chapter), probably because we all had COVID-19 pandemic considerations more in mind. In this document, pictures of brain scans have disappeared in favour of a graph reproduced from the ‘Center on the developing child’ at Harvard University. This graph illustrates the temporal relationship of the development of sensory functions in relation to language and cognition via interconnected inverted U-shaped curves arranged along a timeline, with the period up to two years highlighted in pink. This is under the heading ‘The 1,001 critical days is when the foundations of the brain’s architecture are built’. The text under this heading reads: Construction of the basic architecture of the brain begins before birth. More than a million new neural connections are formed every second in the first year of a baby’s life. Sensory pathways for basic functions like vision and hearing develop first, followed by early language skills and higher cognitive functions. This is the peak period of brain development. (16) So, while ‘brain development’ is clearly not the same as brain function (though how they relate to each other is undoubtedly an interesting, and not simple, question), one could be forgiven for reading this as suggesting that ‘development’ has peaked at day 1002, and it’s all downhill from here! Interestingly, Parent-Infant Psychotherapy (PIP) gets quite an airing in this document, perhaps unsurprisingly as two of its main advocates, Jane Barlow and Peter Fonagy, were two of the three Professors named as in the advisory group for the report. Rapid narrative moves are made from claims involving early experience, including prenatal experience, through to societal prosperity. Moreover, ‘the science’ is claimed to be unified and consensual, as in the quotation ‘Science tells us that . . .’, which is actually a statement from another document reproduced verbatim in 1001 Critical Days. Since I  am going to discuss this statement further, here it is: Science tells us that a child’s experiences from conception through their first five years will go on to shape their next 50. It tells us that the kind of children we raise today, will reflect the kind of world we will live in tomorrow. It tells us that investing in the start of life is not an indulgence, but economically, socially and psychologically vital to a prosperous society. (page 13 of 1001 Critical Days, 2021) The source document for this quotation turns out to be the CEO’s Foreword to a report on the Royal Foundation-sponsored opinion poll report on ‘Public attitudes to the early years’ (see https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/

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files/ct/news/documents/2020-11/ipsos_mori_son_report_final.pdf, released in November 2020. So, just to clarify, this authoritative statement therefore neither originates from a ‘scientist’ (of any description), nor was it formulated in relation to a review of scientific research on this topic. To highlight the circumlocutions of citation: it comes from the CEO of Ipsos Mori (a market research company specialising in public opinion polls), Jason Knauf’s, Foreword to a report commissioned to identify the UK public’s perceptions of the relevance and importance of the first five years of life, under the heading ‘Our future will be shaped by what we do today’ (page 4). In this document, this statement frames the presentation of a piece of ‘social research’ (so-called) on this topic, involving face-to-face structured interviews with over 3,000 people, an online questionnaire completed by over half a million people in the UK, plus semi-structured interviews with 40 families and 4 community leaders, and ethnographic research with 12 families. As this ‘social research’ had largely been undertaken before the pandemic, the dataset also included a second online questionnaire to pick up issues arising from the recent experience of the pandemic and the impacts of COVID-19. This is certainly an impressive scale of ‘social research’ for a market research organisation. But as the basis for claims about child development surely this takes focus group politics to a new level, substituting public perceptions for research – or rather research on public perceptions – as the evidence base directing policy. This is weirdly circular. Clearly, one of the early lessons of the pandemic was that ‘the science’ is messy, uncertain and contested – not a unified ‘the’ that can tell us anything singular at all. Instead of engaging with this complexity and exploring what is at stake in the various contestations and points of view, it seems that policy discourse has shifted focus to take claims about public perceptions as both the baseline for childrelated interventions and the identification of goals for them. This appears to be a particularly uncanny iteration of the precise dynamic identified by De Vos (2014), whereby the layperson becomes the expert via the ubiquity and presumed legibility of the visual gaze: The iconographic brain is constituted via what I  have called the datagaze. . . . [A]t the site of the production of academic knowledge – i.e., at the site of the object and how this is constructed by science – the latter inevitably harks back to the subject and its intricate and paradoxical autoconstruction (the subject as both constituted and constituting). Brain data is hence always already visual data, as they derive from an encoding of the subjective gaze within the activity of data collection itself. And, moreover, it is in relation to this paradoxical objectifying/subjective gaze that the socalled lay-man identifies him or herself. (11)

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Such examples make explicit how much of this work loops from ideology to research and back into ideology again, comprising and intensifying current conditions for developmentalism. Once again, truth has the structure of fiction: the interpellation of the ordinary person, the public, as if they were the expert on child (brain) development itself reveals the mutual dependencies and contingencies of the ideological construction of common sense, public perception and the supposed scientific evidence. There is nothing new about the mutual legitimation processes at work across disciplines (between psychology and psychoanalysis, for example, and between psychoanalysis and the law), as I have demonstrated elsewhere in relation to the claims made about child witness reliability in false/recovered memory debates (Burman, 1997, 1998), and Arce (2015) has argued more generally. From its inception, the discipline we now think of as developmental psychology not only combined child study with the beginnings of what became child psychiatry but also owed a great deal to literary inventions and depictions of children and childhood in Victorian England (Shuttleworth, 2013). The rise of ‘maternalist’ social policies, alongside the emergence of increasing state interest in the conditions of and for children’s lives, both claimed to support women as mothers while also putting the responsibility for children’s welfare solidly on their shoulders, making motherhood ‘less a lived experience than a site of collective imaginings, a meeting point between private and public spaces’ (Hannity, 2023, p.  11). These policies drew on psychoanalysis, with analysts such as Susan Isaacs and Donald Winnicott playing active roles in popularising their ideas (Riley, 1983; Bar-Haim, 2021). Yet what has now been added to this dynamic of mutual construction is a further layer of self-objectification, or alienation, instituted by the spurious ‘naturalness’ or ‘obviousness’ of the virtual brain image that, in singularising and disembodying psychic (and even organic) life, also strips away culture, history and thereby also the very interpersonal as well as material features that the images are (supposedly) put forward to advocate for. ACE-ing out

Similar dynamics attend subsequent social policy developments. The rush to compress and individualise timescales and spatialities seems to have accelerated, with the ‘all party’ Parliamentary documents mobilising and organising the non-governmental sector. The Parent Infant Foundation (https://parentinfantfoundation.org.uk/1001-days/) claims that ‘The First 1001 Days Movement works with the Conception to Age Two All-Party Parliamentary Group to raise awareness of the importance of the earliest years of life’. Two points are immediately striking about this initiative. First, as noted earlier, the 1,001 days are now explicitly pushed back to conception and, second, the ‘importance’ topicalised here is exclusively framed as ‘emotional development’ – so

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conveniently ruling out explicit consideration of economic and material provisions. A third point to reflect upon is that the website also boasts a ‘consensus statement’ of collective beliefs, which perhaps implicitly acknowledges, if only to repudiate the possibility, that these could be contested. There is certainly controversy around the status of so-called Adverse Child Experiences, even if this seems to guide local government provision. The city in the UK where I live, Manchester, in 2022 declared its ambition to be an ‘ACE-aware, trauma-informed and trauma responsive city’ (https:// www.manchestersafeguardingpartnership.co.uk/resource/adverse-childhoodexperiences-aces-resources-for-practitioners/). Interestingly, this statement comes from the ’Safeguarding partnership’ (signalling child protection issues, which now extend into national security in the context of terrorism; see Alijah forthcoming), while the 2019–2025 strategy document for the city aims to be ‘ACE aware and trauma-informed’ (https://democracy.manchester.gov.uk/documents/s10614/ACE%20aware%20city.pdf). This alignment between ACEs and trauma already casts ‘adverse child experiences’ as (at least potentially) enduringly damaging, while the policies explicitly advocate for early intervention, and (clearly since the pushback for maximal returns on ‘investment’ now goes to conception) the earlier the better. As Winninghoff (2020) notes, practices of closely observing mothers and families seem to be associated with little in the way of a message of hope. Further, what this policy perspective overlooks is the substantial critical engagement with ACEs from a range of childhood and educationalist specialists (e.g. Edwards et al., 2017; Edwards et al., 2019; Kiely & Swirak, 2021), including in response to a supposed consultation with relevant ‘experts’ on this notion (the archive of submissions on the government website cited by Edwards et  al. (2019) is no longer active – a galling but probably indicative example of the ways academic – including my own – labour is used in such policy ‘consultation’). Exploring the complex political positioning accorded parents within the discourse of ACEs, MacVarish and Lee (2019) conclude: By politicising the earliest years of infancy, the first three years movement facilitated a reconstitution of the relationship between the state and the citizen (as parent). But in making its case for more direct state intervention in family relationships, it has tended to generalise problems, denigrate parents and reduce the moral and social significance of family life to instrumentalised, “scientised” meanings. (475) They note that, while this dynamic is long-standing, what is new about ACEs is that they seem to have generated rather more contestation from professionals and also what they call a ‘bolder reaction’ from some parents who resent ‘being constructed as vectors of harm’ (475). They conclude by identifying

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as the key dilemma for state family policy how to provide support without undermining parental authority, although this is rarely recognised since the approach which has dominated the policy domain for the past 30 years has tended to undermine a belief in the capacity of adults to function spontaneously in a competent, autonomous way and to render complex human relationships and social structures in technocratic, pseudoscientised terms. (475) This chapter has shown that not only is ‘science’ a matter of selective reception and interpretation but also of iteration, that transposes popular to technical domains, alongside how policy and parental desires combine to compose developmentalism. The figure of the child is mobilised to warrant multiple biographical compressions, as well as conflations, whose retroactive dynamics reach back ever earlier – from childhood, to infancy, to prenatal status, even to conception. It is as if the unborn child can solve all social problems and social ills in an era of maximal social, political and environmental insecurities. Having outlined and evaluated these sociocultural trends and policy preoccupations, the next chapter returns so equipped to (re)consider psychoanalysis. A  key segue to note is that the notion of trauma at play (whether as ‘trauma-focused’ or ‘trauma-informed’) in ACE discourse runs counter to most psychoanalytic practices, which would understand trauma as recollected and narrated in particular contexts and relationships. These contexts and relationships resonate with, but also add their own frame and so provide an arena to re-work those earlier traumatic experiences. The temporality of trauma, as elsewhere in psychoanalysis, is Nachträglich, that is, it is retroactively constructed. It therefore necessarily imports attention to current (rather than past, whether presumed or attributed) relational and material contexts such that the work of analysis is to explore what it is about these current contexts that prompt recollection of earlier issues. It is a looping and iterative temporality, rather than the future-bound linear time that runs from earlier to later. As such, a very different kind of child emerges. References Alijah, Z. (forthcoming). The preventverse: Child protection, national security and the regulation and pathologisation of Black communities [Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Manchester]. Allen, G. (2011a, January  1). Early intervention: The next steps. Cabinet Office. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-intervention-the-next-steps--2 Allen, G. (2011b). Early intervention: Smart invention, massive savings. Cabinet Office. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-intervention-smart-investmentmassive-savings, published July 4.

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Arce, M. C. (2015). Maturing children’s rights theory: From children, with children, of children. The International Journal of Children’s Rights, 23(2), 283–331. Bar-Haim, S. (2021). The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, motherhood, and the British welfare state. University of Pennsylvania Press. Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. Macmillan. Bott Spillius, E. (1992). Editor’s preface to A. In Piontelli, A. (Ed.), From fetus to child: An observational and psychoanalytic study (pp. ix–x). Routledge. Burman, E. (1997). Telling stories: Psychologists, children and the production of false memories. Theory & Psychology, 7(3), 291–309. Burman, E. (1998). Children, false memories and disciplinary alliances: Tensions between developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 21(3), 307–333. Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). Routledge. Burman, E. (2019). Fanon, education, action: Child as method. Routledge. Burr, R. (2022). Self-worth in children and young people: Critical and practical considerations. Critical Publishing. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. Routledge. Cannon, K. L. (2014). Ec-statically queer images: Queering the photographic through fetal photography. Photography and Culture, 7(3), 269–283. De Vos, J. (2014). The iconographic brain. A critical philosophical inquiry into (the resistance of) the image. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8(300), 1–13. https:// doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00300 De Vos, J. (2015). Deneurologizing education? From psychologisation to neurologisation and back. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 34(3), 279–295. De Vos, J. (2017). The neuroturn in education: Between the Scylla of psychologization and the Charybdis of digitalization. In M. Vandenbroek, J. De Vos, W. Fias, L. M. Olsson, H. Penn, H., D. Wastell, & S. White (Eds.), Constructions of neuroscience in early childhood education (pp. 20–36). Routledge. De Vos, J. (2020). The digitalisation of (inter) subjectivity: A Psy-critique of the digital death drive. Routledge. Edelman, L. (2004). No future. In No future. Duke University Press. Edwards, R., Gillies, V., & White, S. (2019). Introduction: Adverse childhood experiences (ACES)–implications and challenges. Social Policy and Society, 18(3), 411–414. Edwards, R., Gillies, V., Lee, E., Macvarish, J., White, S., & Wastell, D. (2017). The problem with ACEs. Edwards et al.’s Submission to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee Inquiry into the Evidence-base for Early Years Intervention (EY10039), 12. Fraser, E. (2016). Cyborg bonding: 3D fetal ultrasound as a technology of communication and the rise of “boutique” ultrasound. IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 9(1), 68–80. Freeman, E. (2018). Afterword. In K. Brintnall, J. Marchal, & S. Moore (Eds.), Sexual disorientations: Queer temporalities, affects, theologies. Fordham University Press. Freud, S. (1905/1976). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Pelican. Frost, E. A., & Haas, A. M. (2017). Seeing and knowing the womb: A technofeminist reframing of fetal ultrasound toward a decolonization of our bodies. Computers and Composition, 43, 88–105.

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Gill-Peterson, J., Sheldon, R., & Stockton, K. B. (2016). What is the now, even of then? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 22(4), 495–503. Hannity, M. (2023, February 2). Two-year-olds are often cruel. London Review of Books, 11–12. Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell. Hickman, C. (2021, June). Guidance on effective climate communication with children: Guidance prepared by the climate psychology alliance for the schools climate summit, London climate action week. Globe International. http://www.london sustainableschools.org/uploads/1/5/7/4/15747734/effective_climate_change_ communication_with_children-june2021.pdf HM Government. (2021, March 25). The best start for life: A vision for the 1001 critical days. Cabinet Office (147 pages). https://www.gov.uk/government/ publications/the-best-start-for-life-a-vision-for-the-1001-critical-days. Jussila, H., Ekholm, E., & Pajulo, M. (2021). A new parental mentalization focused ultrasound intervention for substance using pregnant women. Effect on selfreported prenatal mental health, attachment and mentalization in a randomized and controlled trial. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 19, 947–970. Kiely, E., & Swirak, K. (2021). Policing parenting, family ‘Support’ and the discipline and punishment of poor families. In The criminalisation of social policy in neoliberal societies (pp. 116–135). Bristol University Press. Leadsom, A., Field, F., Burstow, P., & Lucas, C. (2013, September, reissued 2015). The 1,001 critical days: The importance of the conception to age two period: A cross party manifesto. Department of Health. Macvarish, J., & Lee, E. (2019). Constructions of parents in adverse childhood experiences discourse. Social Policy and Society, 18(3), 467–477. Marks, D. (1999). Disability: Controversial debates and psychosocial perspectives. Routledge. Muñoz, J. E. (2006). Feeling brown, feeling down: Latina affect, the performativity of race, and the depressive position. Signs, 31(3), 675–688. Penn, H. (2010). Shaping the future: How human capital arguments about investment in early childhood are being (mis) used in poor countries. In N. Yelland (ed.) Contemporary perspectives on early childhood education, 49–65. McGraw Hill. Penn, H. (2017). Anything to divert attention from poverty. In M. Vandenbroek, J. De Vos, W. Fias, L. M. Olsson, H. Penn, H., D. Wastell, & S. White (Eds.), Constructions of neuroscience in early childhood education (pp. 54–67). Routledge. Piontelli, A. (1992). From fetus to child: An observational and psychoanalytic study. Routledge. Puar, J. K. (2009). Prognosis time: Towards a geopolitics of affect, debility and capacity. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 19(2), 161–172. Riley, D. (1983). War in the nursery: Theories of the child and mother. Virago. Roberts, J. (2016). The visualised foetus: A cultural and political analysis of ultrasound imagery. Routledge. Rose, H., & Rose, S. (2016, July 5). ‘Mental capital’, neuroscience and early intervention. Discover Society, 34. Retrieved January  10, 2023, from https://archive.dis coversociety.org/2016/07/05/mental-capital-neuroscience-and-early-intervention/ Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. University of California Press.

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Shildrick, M. (2019). Neoliberalism and embodied precarity: Some crip responses. South Atlantic Quarterly, 118(3), 595–613. Shuttleworth, S. (2013). The mind of the child: Child development in literature, science, and medicine 1840–1900. Oxford University Press. Sifaki, A., Quinan, C. L., & Lončarević, K. (Eds.). (2022). Homonationalism, femonationalism and ablenationalism: Critical pedagogies contextualised. Routledge. Stephenson, N., McLeod, K., & Mills, C. (2016). Ambiguous encounters, uncertain foetuses: Women’s experiences of obstetric ultrasound. Feminist Review, 113(1), 17–33. Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Duke University Press. Thomas, G. M. (2017). Picture perfect: ‘4D’ultrasound and the commoditisation of the private prenatal clinic. Journal of Consumer Culture, 17(2), 359–377. Thornton, D. J. (2011). Neuroscience, affect, and the entrepreneurialization of motherhood. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 8(4), 399–424. Vandenbroek, M. (2017). Introduction: Constructions of truth in early childhood education: A history of the present abuse of neurosciences. In M. Vandenbroek, J. De Vos, W. Fias, L. M. Olsson, H. Penn, H., D. Wastell,  & S. White (Eds.), Constructions of neuroscience in early childhood education (pp. 1–19). Routledge. Wiegman, R. (2014). The times we’re in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative ‘turn’. Feminist Theory, 15(1), 4–25. Winninghoff, A. (2020). Trauma by numbers: Warnings against the use of ACE scores in trauma-informed schools. Occasional Paper Series, 43(4), 33–43.

6 DEVELOPMENT AND CHILD IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Now, we turn to the ways psychoanalysis reconstructs, responds to – and sometimes reiterates – prevailing cultural and policy constructions and agendas around developmentalism, children and childhood. But, at the outset, it is important to note that, perhaps contrary to expectation, notions of development and child do not often appear in psychoanalytic texts. There are no entries on ‘child’ or ‘development’ in Laplanche and Pontalis’ (1988) highly regarded dictionary, The Language of Psychoanalysis. While perhaps these absences are not surprising in Lacanian-oriented dictionaries (e.g. Evans, 1996), and even those linking Marxism with Lacan (van der Plas et al., 2022, given their supposed avowed antipathy to developmentalism, it is noteworthy that psychoanalytic texts from other traditions also show a lack of interest in children and development. Even Gaddini’s (1992) psychoanalytic discussion of infantile experience has no Index entry on either ‘child’ or ‘development’, while Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion (Anderson, 1992) has no entry on ‘child’ or ‘development’, albeit of course one on ‘child psychoanalysis’, and Frosh’s (1997) For and against psychoanalysis has no entry on ‘child’ (but, as we shall see, he does comment on developmental psychology). I will shortly consider two contrasting British traditions that, from the early twentieth century (coinciding with the rise of the ‘psy professions’ in general), take children and childhood as their object and subject of concern. In this process, psychoanalysis itself changed. As Hannity (2023) notes, ‘the child didn’t replace the neurotic; the neurotic re-emerged within the child’ (11). But before I do so, it is important to acknowledge that there are also different traditions of child analysis that work with children. The pioneering French child analyst, Maud Mannoni, draws on (another great pioneer) Françoise Dolto’s work (who will be mentioned in Part III as she was Georges DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-9

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Perec’s first analyst), taking an approach emphasising familial signifying practices (see Hall et al., 2018; Owens & Quinn, 2018), and places the child’s search for meaning as central: The child demands the right to understand the things happening to him in one or another of his aggressive reactions which make no sense. The adult rarely observes this, he [sic] blames an intention whereas the child offers a form of behavior to be deciphered. Unable to make out its meaning the adult leaves the child with a desire for knowledge of the word, camouflaged by his claims or acts of rebellion. (Mannoni, 1967, p. 24) Technically, this implies including adults – parents and relatives – and their interpretive frameworks mobilised in understanding the meaning of children’s actions and ‘symptoms’ as part of the analysis. Interpretation, and its relational histories as well as current practices, therefore comes to the fore. The end of psychoanalysis?

Some of these differences can be explained in terms of contrasting understandings of the aims of psychoanalysis, a question that came to the fore in psychoanalytic circles in the 1990s for significant cultural-political reasons. Sandler and Dreher’s text (1996) tries hard to untangle the complex and often contradictory discussions about this. Aims and goals surely invite teleology or an understanding of some normative trajectory. But there is a conundrum, for, since psychoanalysis largely eschews claims of ‘cure’ in favour of selfunderstanding, the question arises: ‘is analysis a therapy or is it a scientific procedure which has as its aim simply to analyse, but which may incidentally be therapeutic?’ (Sandler  & Dreher, 1996, p.  1). After all, symptoms are largely regarded in psychoanalysis as (sometimes rather thwarted attempts at) communication, rather than as mere impediments. As Sandler and Dreher point out, given the importance accorded unconscious processes, the model of science used here cannot be based on neutrality or objectivity, but rather concerns the analyst’s understanding of their own unconscious. While they highlight the plurality of ideas about models and corresponding aims that have informed psychoanalysis from its inception, they also trace historical and cultural shifts over time and space, in particular the transitions from Continental Europe to the UK and the US. There can be no doubt that ego psychologists in the UK and the US subscribe to notions of development, and this can also be understood as a consequence of the shift from a structural model of the psyche to a self-psychology, exemplified also in the differences between the accounts of Daniel Stern and André Green discussed later.

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Significantly, there are clear contradictions and incompatibilities between the various approaches. Sandler and Dreher offer a tripartite classification of psychoanalytic ‘aims’: first, a historical-conceptual perspective that charts the phases of thinking in psychoanalysis and its various schools and traditions; second, a socio-cultural perspective that engages ‘from the point of view of mental health and normality within a particular societal context’ (Sandler & Dreher, 119). This societal context ‘encompasses considerations of the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy and its cost-effectiveness [which]. . . has become particularly important as a consequence of the lowering of funding for analysis by insurance companies’ (119). Yet, even as they acknowledge this instrumental approach, they emphasise not only the necessarily nondirective character of psychoanalysis but also that its outcomes cannot be specified in advance. The third strand concerns clinical and technical differences across models. They conclude by emphasising that patient and analyst work towards a selection of mental health criteria which represent a state of “mental health” specific to the patient in his particular life situation, taking into account all his personal limitations and peculiarities, as well as his socio-cultural context. . . . What this state of “mental health” will be at the end of the analysis cannot be predetermined but will be the product of the interaction and what can be considered to be the continual conscious and unconscious negotiation between the two partners in the analytic enterprise. (123, emphasis original) While they highlight the downplaying of notions of ‘cure’, they acknowledge that the self-research, undertaken via the analytic process, might still give rise to give rise to the alleviation of suffering, albeit that this occurs as a by-product. Further, as they note, transference can never be completely resolved, in more current psychoanalytic accounts the role of insight is downplayed. They also surmise ‘The retrieval of repressed childhood memories is no longer the main aim of analytic work’ (115). These sentiments are echoed in Stephen Frosh’s The Politics of Psychoanalysis (Frosh, 1999), where (although ‘child’ and ‘development’ do not figure in the index), he topicalises the notion of ‘developmental lines’. Frosh, who was trained as both a developmental and clinical psychologist and is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, specifically associates ‘developmental lines’ with ego psychology, and the work of Anna Freud and her followers, which he suggests can offer a ‘fuller account of development’ (89). However, he highlights how its strong normative and correspondingly adaptationist commitments, which are central to its sequential developmental logic, not only align it with conventional developmental psychology but also work to underplay what many people regard as a key tenet of psychoanalysis: the

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‘continuing irrationality of mental life’ (89). Moreover, he points out how such commitments mean that this also reduces the acuity of the account of subjectivity, that is, while Anna Freud is extremely clear in suggesting how a child’s understanding of events might be determined by her or his position on relevant developmental lines, she is less attuned to the unconscious factors which continually disrupt even achieved positions. Her [Anna Freud’s] psychoanalysis is, in its emphasis on ego development and adaptation, akin to conventional developmental psychology; it certainly has more space for emotion than the latter, but it is primarily concerned with normative stages, with prediction and with remediation of blocks to progress. This gives it practical utility but reduces its critical force. (90) Developmentalist revivals in psychoanalysis: back to the future

As we shall see, it has been all too easy for developmentalist explanations to creep back into clinical psychoanalysis. Moreover, while psychoanalysis has been hailed as a critical theoretical tool to counter developmentalism, such recuperations can also arise in critical social theory (including psychology) accounts precisely via those psychoanalytic commitments. In relation to its use in critical feminist psychology, Morss (1996) identifies how the feminist critical psychologist and educationalist Valerie Walkerdine (1987) implicitly resorts to psychoanalytic developmentalism in her (otherwise – or perhaps nevertheless – compelling and influential) discussion of how heterosexed identifications and fantasies are prompted by the frustrations of young women’s positioning, proposing that: ‘Psychoanalysis provides the framework for developmental continuity in the same girl who first struggles with sums and later relaxes with [the popular comics for girls] Bunty and Tracy’ (Morss, 1996, p. 121). Further, Morss traces how another key critical psychologist and then psychoanalyst, Cathy Urwin, in her key chapter in the important text Changing the Subject (Urwin, 1984) portrays Lacan’s mirror stage in developmentalist terms. Just to be clear, there is no question here that Urwin is not following Freud’s own argumentation here. After all, Freud introduces the account of Little Ernst’s play with the cotton reel, the famous ‘fort/ da’ game (briefly mentioned earlier) of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Significantly, this is perhaps the only piece of empirical material Freud offers across his entire corpus as something he directly observed. He presents this as an example of ‘the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities, I mean in children’s play’ (Freud, 1964b/1922, p. 14).

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Freud frames this famous example of his grandson’s reactions to the absence of his mother as ‘the first game played by a little boy of one and a half, and invented by himself’ (14). Here, Freud is distancing himself from his particular relationship with the child, even as he asserts the persistence and significance of the action: It was more than a mere fleeting observation, for I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for some weeks, and it was some time before I  discovered the meaning of the puzzling activity which he constantly repeated. (ibid.) In fact, there is extensive psychoanalytic commentary about what was happening in Freud’s life at this time that led him to live with his daughter for this period, and how analysis of the ‘fort/da’ game reflects his pessimism about the events of the First World War as well as grief over the death of his daughter, Sophie, who was Ernst’s mother. Sophie died of the so-called Spanish flu in 1922 just before the text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle was published. Indeed, Freud could not be more definite in his claim about the generality and functionality of the phenomenon he has observed: The interpretation of the game thus became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement – the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. (Freud, 1964b/1922, p. 15) That is, he interpreted the act of throwing away and retrieving the cotton reel as enabling the child to reproduce a situation to which he is regularly subjected but in a form that they can now control; a ritual of mastery, that – Freud goes on to claim – underlies all forms of play and even creativity. The unpleasure of separation becomes not only tolerable but even pleasurable through reversing identificatory roles and rendering the discarded objects in place of the (momentarily) abandoned child. Mobilised here are key psychoanalytic tropes of repetition, the interplay of (so-called) life and death drives, and some glimmerings of ideas of what drives children’s capacities for representation which, when taken up by Lacan, are emphasised as structuring the process of entering the symbolic order: the child hallucinates the absent object, and this is the basis of the development of representation: the object stands for the mother, and so on. The ‘fort/da’ game has inspired much discussion and is one of the major strands underlying theories of play (whether this psychoanalytic origin is

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acknowledged or not). But is it necessarily developmentalist in its claims? Or logical? Recall Freud’s commitment to the psychopathology of everyday life: we are all subject to being overwhelmed by ‘primitive’ impulses and feelings that might be associated with early life but that recur at any time. Rather than leaving these responses ‘behind’ or no longer experiencing them, the point is that we have a wider repertoire of ways of dealing with these. Going, going, gone: or playing a different game?

Watson (1995) attends to the rhetorical moves in Freud’s description of the ‘fort/da’ game, highlighting how Freud closes down some ambiguities to arrive at an interpretation that works to occlude the mother, just as little Ernst appears to do: however, the interpretive game Freud plays is still largely compensatory and agonistic. He insists on mastering the mother, downplaying (repressing?) her role as analytical precursor by assigning her the position of object, first in the game itself, and then in the explanation of the game. He cites his source only to erase her. (479) Watson, however, goes on to offer a different reading of Freud’s account that departs from Freud’s own argument. He argues that, rather than staging the infant’s vengeful desires to dominate her, a more sympathetically mothercentred, even mother-identified, reading could instead imply: that the movement traced by fort/da is a transition toward the mother’s power and experience (via exploration and experimentation within her subject position) rather than a transition away from the ambiguous gravitational pull of the mother’s body (via alterations in the position of the cotton reel), then maternal subjectivity is no longer merely an indispensable obstacle to be overcome by the developing ego. Instead it assumes its rightful place as an indispensable positive element in that development. Fort/da confirms that growing up is more than just a matter of learning to live at a distance from mother. It is also a matter of learning to do the kinds of things she can do. (484) Not only does he reinterpret Freud through the work of feminist psychoanalytic commentators Nancy Chodorow and Hélène Cixous to posit the child as identifying with the nurturing mother, rather than the violent vengeful child of Freud’s interpretation, Watson also offers the reminder that games do not always demand mastery and also that interpretations can be made

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without making totalising claims. Indeed, Freud’s own concept of ‘overdetermination’, as Watson suggests, already implies caution for the claims that can be made ‘according to which all behavior, including fort/da play, is multiply motivated. This insight should promote interpretive caution, humility, and generosity, since it suggests that other explanations of psychic phenomena can exist alongside one’s own’ (499). Watson concludes by proposing (what he calls) nonagonistic knowledge claims: ‘Interpretation without mastery is a game of fort/da played among subjects rather than with objects, an exploratory game that enriches understanding and ennobles the precursor as well as the player’ (499). Such humility and interpretative cautions, as well as feminist sensibilities, are welcome. Yet we are still left with the unproblematised status of developmentalist accounts, albeit as here oriented to less misogynistic ends. Watson’s account is interesting as it highlights alternative interpretations of Freud’s observations of Ernst’s game; nevertheless, his account leaves intact the developmental imperative. What has changed, in his account, is the endpoint, rather than the fact of a point (so to speak). Alongside highlighting where she moves into developmentalism, Morss also indicates where Urwin undoes this, via acknowledging the role of the mother’s desire. The mother, for example, may conjure in fantasy the potential lover who controls or entices her, or project herself as the passive recipient of the desires of another, or as active and potent, a positioning which may not be available elsewhere. As for the baby in the mirror stage, these kinds of interactions act as a support to the adult’s own narcissism. This is one of the reasons why relating to babies can be so pleasurable. (Urwin, 1984, p. 294, quoted in Morss, 1996, p. 117) Such examples show how some feminist interventions have indicated alternative possible developmental trajectories, rather than dismantling developmentalism. Yet such accounts also risk overlooking other possible directionalities of fantasy and desire, as in the queer theory resources discussed in Chapter 5. From individual to group development

To offer some small account of my own formation, having been attracted to psychoanalytic concepts and ideas as a mode of critique I became interested in how this functioned in analytic practice. Like many other feminists of this period, I  shifted from theoretician to (part-time) practitioner, training as a group analyst (since this form of group work seemed to exemplify the political concerns with authority, democracy and the interconnected characters of the intraindividual and interpersonal with the sociopolitical) (see, e.g. Foulkes, 2018; Hopper, 2003; Barwick & Weegmann, 2018; Nayak & Forrest, 2023).

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But developmentalism was there too – whether in the normalising stages of group development (Tuckman  & Jensen, 1977; Berman-Rossi, 1993; Agmon & Schneider, 1998), or the presumed alignment of maturity with a masculinist autonomy. Even if I could read (what I understood as) developmental(ist) stories as easy templates or shortcuts to facilitate therapeutic interpretations, that should thereby be treated with caution and subjected to more detailed investigation, others took them as straightforward empirical truths. Even more disconcerting was an emerging suggestion that group analysis, as a psychoanalytic professional training, should include some infant observation (Winship, 2001). If this claim was arising in relation to an analytical approach that works with transferential enactments in the here and now of adults talking together for an hour and a half a week, then how much more force would it have for people doing psychoanalytic training to work individually, that is, one to one, in a relationship which explicitly understood to mirror and recapitulate features of parental and other early relationships? Or even more so in work with children? My account here is in part generated specifically to counter such proposals. Back to desire

As Morss (1996, p. 104) pointed out, Freud himself suggests that erotic drives work in such a way that ‘what might appear to be regularity in development would thus be, in reality, little more than a series of side-effects of the conflict of those larger forces’. He notes Lacan’s comments on Freud, which suggest that Freud’s inclination to make repeated recourse to a genetic account ‘is the shakiest aspect of his work’ (Lacan, 1988b, p. 211). As Morss also highlighted, Lacan’s inconsistent subscription to and repudiation of developmentalist assumptions was at best ambivalent, and uncertain, as in the formulation later: If you look at it closely, this domain of the symbolic does not have a simple relation of succession to the imaginary domain whose pivot is the fatal intersubjective relation. We do not pass from one to the other in one jump from the anterior to the posterior. (Lacan, 1988a, p. 223) This inconsistency is demonstrated even in the relation between these two of Lacan’s sentences (something Morss does not point out), for the question of a ‘simple relation of succession’ is next rendered as a matter of passage ‘from one to the other’ whereby the question of whether it is in ‘one jump’ or not seems to be rendered incidental to the fact that it happens. Overall, Morss reads Lacan as primarily sarcastic about, rather than either adhering

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to or robustly rejecting, developmentalism, as indicated by this extract (that Morss, 1996, pp. 111–112, also quotes): One may want to fix man in to a harmonious, natural mode of functioning, one may want to get him to connect the stages of his development, allow him the free blossoming of what in his organism, reaches, in its own time, maturity, and to give to each of these stages its time for play, then its time for adaptation, time for stabilization, until the new living feature makes its appearance. An entire anthropology can be ordered around this. But is that the anthropology that justifies psychoanalyses [sic], that is to say, sticking them on the couch so that they tell us a lot of bloody nonsense? (Lacan, 1988b, p. 85) It is just such ‘anthropology .  .  . of bloody nonsense’ that Gottlieb and Deloach (2016) (discussed in the next chapter) address and reconfigure. Psychoanalysis as viral developmentalism

Over the past two decades, there has been a noticeable shift from talking about ‘developmental psychology’ to ‘developmental science’, with the latter description signalling the alignment with cognitive neuroscience and links with biology, even as it also confirms how individual human lifespan development is the arena through which such general issues can be investigated. This brings us, once again, to the problem of science, and scientism. There are notable cultural-philosophical differences in models of science even between Anglophone and Continental European contexts (Chalmers, 2013), responsible for the misunderstanding of Piaget’s epistemological claims and especially his methodologies, for example (see Burman, 1996), as well as of course with psychoanalysis (Bettelheim, 1983). But even more important is the mis-­rendering of science, or the false model of science that has been taken up as the model for systemic inquiry in social science disciplines, especially Psychology (Harré  & Secord, 1972). (This is likely the source of some of my responses to Barad’s recourse to physics, discussed in Part III.) It is now widely accepted, based on studies from the sociology of science, that scientists do not actually work in the manner described as their method in scientific publications (Latour & Woolgar, 1986). While this is probably true of other disciplines too, it has become a particular problem where an erroneous model is taken up for emulation by social scientists (and especially psychologists, some of whom would like to claim the status and cultural prestige of science). This problem is compounded when applied to the evaluation of matters as nuanced and complex as therapeutic processes. Over the past decades,

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neoliberal political agendas that have given rise to cuts in state provision of mental health services have increasingly mobilised ‘value for money’ and measurability as key criteria. The problem is that the ‘value’ for mental health is measured in economic terms such as individual economic productivity with clear instrumental, societal goals such as getting back into paid work. Some therapies lend themselves to be measured by some such criteria better than others, with cognitive therapies at least allowing for some definite, assessable goals and outcomes, while the shifts as well as ambiguities of both focus and task in psychoanalytic therapies – along with their primarily disadaptationist cosmology (discussed in Chapter 4) – make them fare badly. The rise of evidence-based approaches seemed to sound the death knell for state-funded psychoanalytic provision, and psychoanalytic therapists understandably rushed to find ways to render their work legible to the prevailing regulation and measurement regimes, with some of its major protagonists trying to find ways to adapt to these agendas, as in the ‘what works for whom?’ approach (Roth & Fonagy, 2006). This has often been at the expense of psychoanalysis, entailing repudiating key tenets of a psychoanalytic approach, especially the commitment to exploring unconscious processes. Moreover, not only have such shifts been opportunistic, in the service of pandering to funding priorities, but they also speak to long-standing tensions within the field too. At any rate, the rise of attachment theory certainly corresponds with these instrumentalist agendas, which show no sign of abating. Recent psychiatric literature regards the field as largely accepted, albeit noting the need to limit some claims, especially around the irreversibility of early identified patterns of attachment, but once again this asserts neurological validity: Disorders and personality disorders have decisively determined the neuronal activation patterns found. The assignment to distinct types of binding must not take place in a unilinear or monocausal sense. Nonetheless, the findings give a significant insight into the neurobiological mediation mechanisms of impaired mental functions of empathy and mentalization of patients who are currently under massive stress and presently have different attachment patterns. (Lahousen et al., 2019, p. 929) Alongside this, psychotherapists are advised to consider the neurological basis of relationship formation as relevant to their practices (Holmes & Slade, 2019; Slade & Holmes, 2019). Even (as in the Holmes & Slade articles motivating for Attachment-Informed Psychotherapy (AIP)) where Bowlby is not mentioned, his legacy is very clear in his approach to science.

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Bowlby: scientising psychoanalysis

In a widely referenced article, originally published in the flagship journal of the English-language mainstream psychoanalytic community, International Review of Psychoanalysis, Bowlby (1981) presents his rationale for a scientifically based psychoanalysis, taking biology, rather than physics as his preferred ‘natural’ scientific model, since physicists have made their striking advances by excluding from consideration all but the simplest phenomena. Biologists, by contrast, are wrestling with phenomena of vastly greater complexity and perforce have had to employ different methods of investigation and to rest content with criteria of acceptability which, though stringent, are less rigorous than those of the physicist. Suffice it to say, therefore, that the procedures that I believe psychoanalysts will be wise to employ, and the criteria to which our science should strive to conform, are close to those adopted by our neighbours in the biological sciences. (253, emphasis added) Psychoanalysis, then, is presented as a less exact science than physics, but one that – like biology and other ‘life sciences’ – engages multiple complexities. To aid this, Bowlby draws on ethology, systems theory, comparative psychology and information processing approaches. It would be hard to disagree with his argument about the inappropriateness of basing understandings of development on the atypical experiences of children already subject to major separations and already identified disturbance, even if the move into prospective studies seems to take theorising into rather different territory. Similarly, attending to how children are actually treated, as well as their internal representations of these experiences, is clearly important. Bowlby is also on safe ground when he points out that Freud and the early psychoanalysts’ metapsychological understandings of developmental psychology were based on what are now largely discredited nineteenth models – such as those of Haeckel’s recapitulationism and Lamarckism (around the transmissibility of acquired characteristics). As he puts it: ‘Although psychoanalysis is avowedly a developmental discipline, it is nowhere weaker, I believe, than in its concepts of development’ (249). But the conclusion he draws from this is to not to abandon developmentalism, but rather to try to ‘correct’ it. His strategy is to claim that there are other ways of accounting for the phenomena that Freud describes in terms of unconscious processes, even as he also ends by (correctly) distinguishing the ‘scientific’ project of psychoanalytic psychological research from the clinical work: ‘our task as psychoanalysts is, when researchers, to render unto science the things that are scientific and, when clinicians, to render unto persons the things that are personal’ (253).

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Ethological and observational methodologies have of course been a longstanding contributor to (behaviourally inclined) early childhood researchers (as in Blurton Jones’ important studies, Blurton Jones, 1972), so it was not only Bowlby who was impressed by the studies of Konrad Lorenz and his study of the imprinting behaviour of new-born animals in following or finding their mothers, while – it should be noted – Lorenz was correspondingly influenced by psychoanalytic ideas (see van der Horst, 2009). But ‘reasonable’ as Bowlby’s arguments are, they also underplay or de-emphasise the narrative, as well as transferential, aspects of psychoanalysis as the ‘talking cure’, and the significance of the retroactive reconstruction of early experiences. And, not least, one of the most subversive aspects of psychoanalysis – sexuality – is cut out of the picture. At issue is not only the model of processes at issue but also where and when they apply. This poses major questions of time and space: inside or outside the consulting room, as well as the understanding of what happened (in childhood) and its meaning according to when and how it is recalled in an analytic context. Bowlby is at his most conciliatory to psychoanalysis in this article, even including a clinical extract (not from his own practice). Elsewhere he was clearer about his sense of marginalisation from psychoanalysis until late in his life. (There is certainly considerable truth in this, since many psychoanalysts regarded Bowlby as having departed from key tenets of psychoanalysis in his attachment theory, especially around the status of the unconscious, infantile sexuality, as well as adaptation.) In other publications, he was less guarded about his political views (which admittedly might not be so different from many other psychoanalysts) on women and childcare, with such comments as: You see, there are these extreme feminists who take the line, “I  can have children, I  needn’t look after them, I’m going to go ahead with my career and I’m damned if I’m going to be handicapped by having to look after children”. . . . Some [women] put childcare first and their own careers second; others put their own careers first and the children third or fourth. (Bowlby et al., 1986, p. 51) He also presumed gender essentialist roles of mothers and fathers, even when challenged over this by his interviewers. All this lends his proposals for scientific psychoanalysis a fixed, conservative and certainly heteronormative quality, and one that even attempts to disregard other approaches or readings, as in: I believe that our discipline [psychoanalysis] should be put on a scientific basis. A lot of people either think you can’t or don’t know how to. There

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are people who think psychoanalysis is really a hermeneutic discipline. I think that’s all rubbish quite frankly. (ibid., 55) Connecting again with Child as method: the case of infant observation

Having outlined the stakes in formulating an antidevelopmentalist psychoanalysis, it is time to turn to a particularly vexed area of apparent convergence between developmental psychology and psychoanalysis: infant observation. While the heat seems to have gone out of this as a debate, nevertheless, as we have seen, the wider cultural-political scene is fully signed up to this connection. Hence, the lack of recent literature can perhaps be regarded as an admission of defeat or else the success of the claims of the neuropsychologists in their dubious alliance with some forms of (what is called) psychoanalysis, as in the Anna Freud Centre in London and the research clustered around Peter Fonagy and his colleagues. While I  have discussed (and critiqued), this work extensively elsewhere (in Burman, 2017), a few comments are in order here. To start more generally, many researchers have regarded infancy as a ‘special case’ in attempting to theorise child and human development. After all, the human infant is (by definition) pre-verbal – the term infans of course means without speech – and with a limited behavioural repertoire via which psychological states can be inferred. These interpretive and practical challenges have inspired ingenious research apparatuses and practices, as in the ‘visual cliff’ experiment to determine the extent of infant depth perception (Gibson  & Walk, 1960) a paradigm which was extended to evaluate attachment issues (Sorce et  al., 1985), and following and interpreting eye movements to hypothesise about the infants’ mental capacities – in this case expectation of collision (Bower  & Paterson, 1972), from which to make claims about what they might know about the permanence of objects (e.g. Baillargeon, 1987). Clearly, infancy is a challenging arena for research, giving rise to a major methodological focus exposing tenuous claims, since these are difficult to evaluate even according to positivist scientific criteria. As we have seen especially in Chapter 5, the policy domain is of course replete with agendas on early intervention, or what might better be called ‘catching them young’ (a phrase which is used entirely unironically in thousands of policyoriented research articles). Childhood studies have also ventured into the arena of infancy, extending claims about children to even younger children – whether about rights and capabilities that impact consent issues (Alderson, 2008) – but also drawing on ever more creative interpretive frameworks to support speculations about subjectivities and modes of relationship in early life (Lupton, 2013; Rosen,

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2015) and to highlight culturally specific beliefs surrounding the status of very young children (Smørholm, 2016; Gottlieb et al., 2014). Recently, the journal Childhood has even published a study drawing on psychoanalytic infant observation (Gitz-Johansen, 2022), thus paving the way for some rapprochement of approach. So, infancy is also where psychoanalytic attributions of imputations of psychic life are at their most tenuous. As we shall now see, psychoanalytic debates, theory and empirical research, extend from the preverbal child in a number of contrasting different directions. Observed versus clinical infant

Before entering these debates and rehearsing criticisms in more detail, it is worth considering the position adopted by Daniel Stern. In his influential book The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Stern (1985) claimed that ‘psychoanalysts are developmental theorists working backwards in time’ (20), and that his approach ‘is normative rather than pathomorphic and prospective rather than retrospective’ (20). In an interesting turnaround for anti/ developmentalist claims in psychology and psychoanalysis, Stern criticises the notion of stages which he designates as part of the psychoanalytic repertoire. The rationale he offers is to depart from what he sees as the circularity of reasoning associated with psychoanalysis, even as he also distinguishes between the ‘observed infant’ and the ‘clinical infant’: ‘the subjective life of the adult, as self-narrated, is the main source of inference about the infant’s felt quality of social experience. A degree of circularity is unavoidable’ (17). Stern regards the status of the relationship between an observational study and psychoanalysis as, not overlapping, but rather as having three crossing points, or interfaces. This is because he sees that ‘there must be some way that actual happenings, that is, observable events (“mother did this, and that . . .”) – become transformed into subjective experiences that clinicians call intrapsychic (“I experienced mother as being . . .”)’ (18). However, as we shall see, this precisely misunderstands the clinical significance of the backward generation/ construction of accounts of past experience, of Nachträglichkeit, that (as discussed later) André Green and others champion. Stern’s other two points are indicative of the kind of professional complementarity he espouses, shading from conciliation into mutual admiration and pedagogy: ‘the therapist who is better acquainted with the observed infant may be in a position to help parents create more appropriate life narratives’ (18). This argument is put forward without saying why this professional advice might be helpful or how this would happen. Nor is there any indication of on what basis they would evaluate a life narrative to be ‘appropriate’, or not. Normalisation is clearly seen as a good thing (recall it is counterposed to pathologisation, Stern mistakenly seeing this as an alternative rather than that these two components

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are mutually constitutive). The lessons are of course reciprocal: ‘the observer of infants who is better acquainted with the clinical infant may be prompted to conceive of new directions for observation’ (ibid.) There are some well-known criticisms of this position. Philip Cushman (1991), for example, highlights the ideological assumptions inscribed within Stern’s account: ‘By exonerating political structures as causal factors, decontextualized theories legitimize, justify, and perpetuate current arrangements of power and privilege’ (206). This critique is significant since clearly Cushman is not in principle hostile to psychoanalysis, since in a later article he suggests that the movement known as ‘relational psychoanalysis’ may have the potential to counter the alienation installed by neoliberalism (Cushman, 2015). Frosh (1997) also suggests that Stern misses the point, arguing that his developmental research stays at the level of the interpersonal which is at a different level of description and explanation from psychoanalysis. Rather, psychoanalysis makes inferences about intrapsychic subjective experience. While Stern’s project may allow for some reconciliation with positivist scientific methodologies, then, it precludes what is a key element of the psychoanalytic method: that the engagement with a child’s state of mind can only be accessed and understood through analysis of one’s own unconscious response. Science Fictions

If Bowlby and his successors’ aims to scientise psychoanalysis have met social policy agendas, nevertheless claims to be empirically informed by research on young children (and infants) have not been uncontested within the field. Peter Wolff threw down the gauntlet in a key article entitled ‘The irrelevance of infant observations for psychoanalysis’ (Wolff, 1996). In this, he took the work of his contemporary, Emde (e.g. Emde, 1991) as a key target for critique to draw attention to the circularity of reasoning in psychoanalytically informed empirical research. Wolff’s criticisms are significant as he was himself both an infant researcher and psychiatrist (readers who have studied developmental psychology will recognise this name from his pioneering studies of smiling behaviour, mother/infant relations and sleeping patterns in early infancy, e.g. Wolff, 1963, 1967). In recognition of his work in this area, an obituary for Wolff claims him as ‘an unnamed developmental psychobiologist’ (Developmental Psychobiology, 2021). In so doing, this obituary also – significantly, if unsurprisingly – fails to cite this 1996 article in the ­selection they list from his long list of publications. Wolff was a psychoanalyst as well as a refugee, humanitarian activist and polymath, including infancy researcher, and was therefore in a good position to evaluate claims made for infancy in psychoanalysis. Wolff highlighted the incoherence and post hoc reasoning informing claims about notions of (prospective) stages, claiming that these invite

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selective attention to focus only on evidence confirming researcher expectations, which then produce developmentalist fallacies: Lacking any such rules other than temporal confluence, the investigator builds his [sic] stages from large numbers of confirming examples by a strategy of enumerative induction, but this procedure does not accommodate disconfirming examples. Lacking theoretically derived rules for deciding which of the many changes that may be observed at any time are relevant or irrelevant for affect development, he therefore selects, from a wealth of possible variables, those consistent with his a priori assumptions about the biological foundations of affective experience. He then links the selected empirical variables with inferences about the infant’s subjective experience, thereby relating, for example, structural changes in selected regions of the nervous system with the emergence of a new stage of subjective social experience, or hemispheric asymmetries of electrophysiological activation with assumptions about qualitative differences in the experience of positive and negative affects. (Wolff, 1996, pp. 379–380) This is a fairly devastating repudiation of this paradigm of research. Wolff instead highlighted the messiness and discontinuities of early neonatal and infant development alongside, not only the key philosophical differences, but also differences of the project between empirical research and clinical psychoanalysis, arguing that: ‘psychoanalytically informed infant observations may be the source for new theories of social-emotional development, but that they are essentially irrelevant for psychoanalysis as a psychology of meanings, unconscious ideas, and hidden motives’ (1996, p. 369). If Wolff opened the debate about the status of infant observation for psychoanalysis, this controversy was ratcheted up several notches in the staged, and clearly heated, exchanges between André Green and Daniel Stern, described in the book of the encounter (Sandler et al., 2001). In the debate between Green and Stern, it is Stern’s academic credentials that are foregrounded in the biographical description, the psychoanalytic aspects of which include being ‘a Lecturer at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalysis’. By contrast, André Green is described as a training analyst in Paris, former President of the Paris Psychoanalytic Institute and with a string of other international organisational appointments (including being a Freud memorial chair at University College, London). While each figure occupied both academic and clinical positions, then, it is clear that Green’s psychoanalytic training credentials are higher. Notwithstanding Stern’s combined geographical arenas of study (in both Geneva and the US, the former enabling him to engage with Piagetian-­ oriented traditions, which are particularly specific in their claims about

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infancy, e.g. Butterworth, 1977), in his Introduction, Steiner points to the ways Stern’s (2000) approach reflects US culture in its pragmatism, eclecticism and political optimism (noted of US psychoanalysis more generally by Mitchell & Harris, 2004). Stern is sometimes described as a psychoanalyst (as in the Wikipedia entry for the 1985 book), while the inside front cover of the hardback edition of the key text The Interpersonal World of the Child hails him as a ‘famed infant psychiatrist’. Elsewhere he claims to be, and is described as, a developmental psychologist. Green clarifies what is at stake without mincing his words. To summarise, this includes the place of science in psychoanalysis; whether one can know an infant’s state of mind; the irreducibly interpretive character of clinical psychoanalysis; the theoretical status of language and the sloppiness of Stern’s language use; and the distance from (what he calls) the ‘true child’ – the child of psychic reality – and (what he – rather scornfully – terms) the ‘real child’. The core arguments at issue rest on the question of temporality and place of psychoanalysis. Steiner (2000, p.  4), in his Introduction to the volume, glosses André Green’s position as asserting ‘we can only reconstruct those events post-factum with all the complications, distortions and unconscious processes and defences, and personal projections of the adult observer, interpreter or narrator of those events’ (Steiner, 2000, p. 4). Finding versus losing the inner infant

In addition to, or rather as part of, repudiating the direct relevance of the ‘empirical’ work on infancy, Green makes an important claim, that ‘there is more in common between adult and child analysis than between child analysis and infant research’ (Green 51). Once again, the key distinction here concerns what belongs to the domain of research, and what to the consulting room. So, rather than meriting special considerations on grounds of developmental stage or limitations, Green asserts the priority of focus on the analytical task and setting, such that adult and child analysis are both analysis. On this point, Green is in good company. Maud Mannoni (1967) made similar comments decades earlier, also highlighting that the technical and interpretive challenges originate from the analyst rather than the child: Child psychoanalysis does not differ in spirit (in listening) from the psychoanalysis of adults; but the adult, even the psychoanalyst, is often handicapped himself when he tackles the problems of childhood by his conception (Imaginary projection) of the problems. (Freud himself is not blameless in this respect.) All studies of childhood involve adults with all their reactions and prejudices. (24)

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In terms of mode of practice, for Mannoni, this invites a kind of ­psychoanalytically-informed family therapy, whereby ‘the analyst endeavors to understand the words that remain petrified in an anxiety or encased in a physical disorder’ (61), as they would with an adult, except that the assumption is that the ‘symptom’ expresses a conflict between what the child understands they represent for each parent and what they actually are. So, in order to change the chain of meanings at play, in Mannoni’s practice the analysis would involve the parents as much as the child, such that ‘the parents will be led to reappraise themselves in the context of their past history; and from the child, now addressed as the subject, the analyst will get words that are sometimes astonishingly articulate’ (62). Or, put more succinctly: ‘We listen to the parents’ discourse because it explains what is nameless in the child’ (Mannoni, 1967, p. 198). This approach is also reflected in more recent discussions of Lacanianoriented child analysis (Owens & Quinn, 2018; Stavchansky, 2018). Liora Stavchansky (2018) reminds us that ‘Psychoanalysis is not about making predictions or diagnosis, but readings of the present structure and betting through the analyst’s interventions to open unexpected possibilities for the people that come into the office’ (133–134). Specifically considering the position accorded the child, she writes in a similar vein to Maud Mannoni: The child occupies the place of another (child) in a supplementary and failed fashion. The child we call spectral substitutes for the lack, the pure absence of another (child), whether living or dead. This child is desire for another child as an extension. What we are talking about is the substitution of the lack. (135) She draws attention to (what she calls) two operations potentially at work in psychoanalysis around (including with) children: ‘one in which the child answers as a subject, and the other in which the child is realised as an object’ (136). Green, who is not a Lacanian, follows through the logic of this kind of approach, when he draws out the contrasts between his conception and that of Stern, with psychoanalysis dealing with the subject’s psychic reality, rather than any claim to reality: as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, the ‘real child’ is not our concern. Dialectically, I would oppose the real child to the ‘true’ child. The true child is based on psychic reality, a concept that has lost its original meaning. (Green 51–2)

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Implicitly warding off a Bowlbyan engagement with ‘real events’, Green argues that it is impossible to presume how these are understood by any subject: While it seems reasonable to oppose the psychic reality of the patient to external reality, in fact the analyst cannot compare the two fields, because the indications for psychoanalysis are that the patient will not confuse the analytic situation with a torture chamber or an enchanted palace. (Green 52) (Just to be clear, Green is highlighting how it may indeed be perfectly possible for the patient to experience the analytic situation as either arena.) He therefore asserts the central task of psychoanalysis as engaging with the analysand’s internal reality, including his relationships. This means that no real child can be retrieved, the child is ‘lost’: In an analytic relationship the real child of the past is definitely lost. What survives is a mixture of the real and the fantasized, or, to be more precise, a “reality” reshaped through fantasy. (Green 52, emphasis added) Green therefore cautions against invoking any special conceptual (as opposed to technical) differences in analysing infants and young children, asserting the antidevelopmentalist claim: ‘. . . it is adult analysis that enriches infant research, and not the other way round’ (Green 53). He also points out that even very young children have some awareness of their own history (what he calls ‘the infant in the child’ or for, even younger children, ‘the infant in the infant’), just as in psychoanalytic practice with adults one is dealing with ‘the infant in the adult’: As psychoanalysts, our true object is not the infant but the infant in the adult, which may have very little to do with what really happened to the patient in infancy. Then what about the infant in the infant? If one has to deal with a child, then there is an “infant in the child”. If it is an infant that is being investigated, then the researcher’s postulates, beliefs and methods are part of that person’s understanding of infancy through the adult that he (or she) is, and even (why not?) his or her own infancy. (Green, 2000, p. 58) As with Mannoni and others, the key interpretive issue – as well as resource – is how this construction of the ‘infant within the infant’, or child, or adult (for that matter) is framed by others, as well as the demand on the part of the

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psychoanalyst to attend to their own personal history and how it is engaged by the analysand. Retrieving a non-child developmental subject

I indicated earlier that this debate between what counts as research and what counts as clinical work has gone quiet in recent years. Indeed, it is tempting to see a gentle(wo)men’s agreement between followers of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud as currently holding sway, as a successor to the famous (and rather androcentrically named) ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ (so-called because it was unwritten, so highlighting a world of classed as well as gendered assumptions), which was brokered within the British Psychoanalytic Society to resolve the so-called ‘controversial discussions’ on psychoanalytic training and rivalry between these two traditions in London in the 1940s. At any rate, what seems to be happening is a kind of polite separation between research and clinical work. But what does this allow? One way around the epistemological conundrum surrounding the status of infant observation, especially in the Kleinian-influenced work of the Tavistock Clinic, has been to shift the developing subject from the child (or infant) to the adult. In asserting the importance of infant observation practices, what is claimed is that these serve an important professional pedagogical purpose. In preserving some core function for infant observation, in the face of major logical and political flaws identified both within and from outside the field, this now topicalises the adult (professional, trainee), rather than the child, as the developmental and therapeutic subject. I will outline the key features of this process. To recall, the Tavistock follows Kleinian models most closely, and their early text, Closely Observed Infants (Miller et al., 1989), distinguishes their approach to infant observation as engaged not just with mental capacities (as they portray Stern to be) but with the whole emotional state of the child (see Rustin, 1989, Fn 10, 202, and Fn 12, 203). Moreover, this text disputes Stern’s claim that there is no psychoanalytic experience before language (Shuttleworth, 1989, p. 33). The authors describe the process in terms of the qualities demanded of the observer (see also Shuttleworth, 1989). This first point, therefore, focuses on being receptive to one’s own and others’ emotions: Descriptions of the mother-baby couple’s delight in each other, of a baby’s distress or mother’s emotional withdrawal, though they may seem straightforward are only possible because the observers were able to take in feelings and subsequently remember and reflect on them. The observer has to be a receptive register of emotions in others and herself. (Rustin, 1989, p. 66)

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The second point this text highlights is the need to be attentive to symbolic, implicit meanings: ‘Observers have to bring an awareness of the implicit and the metaphorical to the situation, if they are to be sensitive to the less conscious aspects of the mother’s communication’ (Rustin, 1989, p. 66), as well as, third, ‘Working at remembering and rendering accurately in words what has been seen and felt, is an important part of learning to observe, an integral part of the development of the observer herself as a sensitive recording instrument’ (ibid., 69). While it may be an improvement on traditional developmental psychology to insist that the processes observed are ‘both social and psychological’ (Shuttleworth, 1989, p. 38), still, this risks introducing a dynamic of surveillance and normalisation such that in reviewing this book I called it ‘closely observed mothers’ (Burman, 2002). Acknowledgement of this dynamic is expressly topicalised in its most uneasy form in a chapter in the second key book published less than a decade later, summarising the work of the Tavistock Clinic, Developments in Infant Observation (Reid, 1997). In her chapter, Lynda Ellis (1997) reflects on her own assumptions and judgements generated through her observations as a trainee of a mother–child couple, where the mother is a young professional woman, who is Black and has recently migrated to the UK. This is where the concern with countertransference (initiated by Paula Heimann in 1949), the analyst’s responses to the material they encounter comes into play. Countertransference is sometimes seen as an analytical resource, but at the very least, it is an issue that the analyst must deal with in their own analysis (see also Alexandris & Vaslamatzis, 2018; Prodgers, 1991). I  will consider Ellis’ account in more detail, as it highlights some of the dilemmas involved in the intense and personal practice of infant observation placements conducted as part of a psychoanalytic or other professional training. Ellis expresses concerns about the processes of reporting and discussing her reflections on her observations in her seminar group, the key arena for training therapists to report and process their observations, where the group seemed ill-equipped to know how to deal with modes of relating to infants that flouted their own cultural commitments: The seminar setting began to feel at times a less than comfortable or satisfactory place in which to reflect on those aspects of Mrs  Ekoku’s temperament and personality which seemed to create particular difficulties for her as an individual and as a mother. To some extent this was to do with a growing awareness within the group of the complexities and limitations of the essentially white, Eurocentric theoretical and ideological framework within which we were thinking about what was being observed, and our genuine misgivings about the pervasiveness and

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determinism of the particular socio-cultural contexts within which we had developed as individuals and which we shared in unspoken ways in group interpretations. (63–4) Yet, slowly, Ellis became aware that foundational assumptions, that is, foundational to her and the group, around a single, exclusive mother–child bond, did not seem to apply. Note, this was likely before discussions of othermothering, allomothering and multiple mothering (Butler, 2007; Bloch, 2017) had gained widespread acknowledgement in Anglophone literature studies, including psychoanalytic literature studies (e.g. Wing & Weselmann, 1999; Bryant, 2022). Ellis continues: It became increasingly apparent to me that the socio-cultural constructions to which this mother had been exposed did not have at their heart a notion of the exclusivity or specialness of the relationship between birth mother and baby which seems to be firmly rooted, even idealised, in contemporary Western approaches to child-rearing. (64) Moreover, Ellis describes how the micro-focus on the mother–child relationship obscured wider, constitutive positions and experiences in ways that psychologised, or treated as personal, attributes of the mother (or child) that could, in fact, be better accounted for by the constraints of the context. This also leads her to reflect on how little the models available were able to engage with the experience of cultural marginalisation and alienation that compounded what may be more common experiences of fragmentation and dislocation from communities of origin: for Mrs Ekoku there was the overlay of an experience also of being alienated from the taken-for-granted, comfortably familiar codes of a mainstream culture which could only heighten her sense of being unheld and unbelonging, cut adrift from her cultural roots and the practical support of an extended family network. (64) This description of her misgivings can itself be read as indicating a kind of white fragility (DiAngelo, 2016, 2018) in the form of sustaining the focus on these psychological professionals informed by developmental psychoanalysis, as well as the impact on the observed mother and child. At any rate, this leads Ellis to consider how she failed to appreciate the importance of the visit of a family member from the mother’s country of

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origin, as well as the impacts of living in a hostile racist environment on mothering, drawing out the implication that: We need to think about how patterns of behaviour which might be deemed maladaptive in one environment might in fact be adaptive in another, for example, the context of dealing day by day with attributions of inferiority and oppression born of a history of tribal conflict, slavery, contemporary nationalism and global racism. (69) Important as these reflections are, for the training of professionals, it is unclear what has changed since then that would present such stigmatisation and pathologisation. Moreover, a sleight of hand can be discerned in more recent accounts (Sternberg, 2005; Hollway, 2012; Meek, 2005; Shulman, 2019) from closely observing mothers (and children) to closely observing professionals: closely observed professionals observing themselves, reflecting upon themselves in line with developmentalist nostrums. This is all at the expense of the disappearing child. (Thomson-Salo’s, 2014, subsequent collection reproduces the classic papers, including the key essay by Esther Bick – who first instituted observation at the Tavistock Clinic – on the child’s interpersonal environment as its ‘second skin’, Bick, 1968). The most recent spat on the status of infant observation was between Groarke (2008) and Rustin (2011), which replays some of the same points made by Wolff and Green in relation to Stern, and alongside Rustin’s earlier claims. The most reconciliatory accounts of the relations between research and clinical work (e.g. Urwin, 2007; Urwin & Sternberg, 2012) resolve tensions in favour either of complementarity or of the pedagogical value in training professionals. Nevertheless, Rustin (2014) still proposes that the material emerging from infant observation can inform early intervention strategies, while Shulman (2019) extends the model from trainee psychoanalytic psychotherapists to social workers. This chapter has traced some (historical and more recent) challenges to what was earlier (in Chapter 4) identified as psychoanalysis’ constitutive critique of notions of development. Mobilising a Child as method sensibility, I  have attended to some key examples where psychoanalysis has (implicitly and even explicitly) taken up developmentalism. In some senses, the question of the status accorded the child and early experience poses anew the long-standing debate about the purposes and goals of psychoanalysis, discussed here as arising in part because of how it has adapted to the cultural arenas of its practice. Ambiguities around the status of the child within clinical and research contexts were identified from Freud’s own account of his grandson and the ‘fort/da’ game, even as this can be interpreted in other ways. Once again, attachment theory

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has come to the fore, including competing claims around science and models of scientificity as well as problematic sociopolitical assumptions that guided the theory from the outset. The review of the key debate between Stern and Green helped clarify claims about the distinction between clinical work with and empirical work on children, and also established child and adult analysis as analytically equivalent (if technically different) projects, as both assume a subject who reflects upon and reconstructs their personal history. This perspective was drawn upon to pose anew questions about the status of infant observation (and its complex relationships with infancy research) as a key arena for the (re)formulation of developmentalist ideas. However, even as some of the claims have come to be modified, what has emerged is that even when infant or child developmentalism no longer figures so importantly within psychoanalytic training, developmentalism is still present. Rather, the unit of development has shifted from child to adult, albeit that the adult is now positioned as a metaphorical child within psychoanalytic training. Clearly, vigilance is needed to ward off the return of implicit modes of developmentalism within psychoanalytic theories, institutions and training. For, even if this now has little to do with chronological children, as Ellis’ example shows, it is nevertheless vital for democratic and equality issues in training and practice.

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Gibson, E. J., & Walk, R. D. (1960). The “visual cliff”. Scientific American, 202(4), 64–71. Gitz-Johansen, T. (2022). Intersubjectivity in the nursery: A  case-study from Denmark. Childhood, 29(1), 112–125. Gottlieb, A., & DeLoache, J. S. (2016). A world of babies: Imagined childcare guides for eight societies. Cambridge University Press. Gottlieb, A., Otto, H.,  & Keller, H. (2014). Is it time to detach from attachment theory? Perspectives from the West African rain forest. In A. Gottlieb, H. Otto, & H. Keller (Eds.), Different faces of attachment: Cultural variations on a universal human need (pp. 187–214.) Cambridge University Press, Green, A. (2000). Science and science fiction in infant research. In J. Sandler, A.M. Sandler, & R. Davies (Eds.), Clinical and observational psychoanalytic research: Roots of a controversy (pp. 41–72). International Universities Press. Groarke, S. (2008). Psychoanalytical infant observation: A critical assessment. European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, 10(4), 299–321. Hall, G., Hivernel, F., & Morgan, S. (Eds.). (2018). Theory and practice in child psychoanalysis: An introduction to the work of Francoise Dolto. Routledge. Hannity, M. (2023, February 2). Two-year-olds are often cruel. London Review of Books, 11–12. Harré, R., & Secord, P. F. (1972). The explanation of social behaviour. Rowman & Littlefield. Heimann, P. (1949/1990). On counter-transference. Reprinted in R. Langs (Ed.), Classics in psychoanalytic technique (pp. 139–142). Rowman & Littlefield. Hollway, W. (2012). Infant observation: Opportunities, challenges, threats. Infant Observation, 15(1), 21–32. Holmes, J.,  & Slade, A. (2019). The neuroscience of attachment: Implications for psychological therapies. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 214(6), 318–319. Hopper, E. (2003). The social unconscious: Selected papers. Jessica Kingsley. Lacan, J. (1988a). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 1: Freud’s papers on technique 1953–1954. Norton. Lacan, J. (1988b). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II. The ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Norton. Lahousen, T., Unterrainer, H. F.,  & Kapfhammer, H. P. (2019). Psychobiology of attachment and trauma – Some general remarks from a clinical perspective. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10, 914–929. Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. B. (1988). The language of psycho-analysis (D. NicholsonSmith, Trans.). Routledge. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton University Press. Lupton, D. (2013). Infant embodiment and interembodiment: A review of sociocultural perspectives. Childhood, 20(1), 37–50. Mannoni, M. (1967). The child, his ‘illness’ and the others. Penguin. Meek, H. W. (2005). Promoting self-awareness: Infant observation training as a model. Smith College Studies in Social Work, 75(3), 33–58. Miller, L., Rustin, M., Rustin, M., & Shuttleworth, J. (Eds.). (1989). Closely observed infants. Duckworth. Mitchell, S. A., & Harris, A. (2004). What’s American about American psychoanalysis? Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14(2), 165–191.

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Morss, J. R. (1996). Growing critical: Alternatives to developmental psychology. Routledge. Nayak, S., & Forrest, A. (Eds.). (2023). Intersectionality and group analysis: Explorations of power, privilege and position in group therapy in group analysis. Jessica Kingsley. Owens, C., & Quinn, S. F. (Eds.). (2018). Lacanian psychoanalysis with babies, children, and adolescents: Further notes on the child. Routledge. Prodgers, A. (1991). Countertransference: The conductor’s emotional response within the group setting. Group Analysis, 24(4), 389–407. Reid, S. (Ed.) (1997). Developments in infant observation: The Tavistock model. Routledge. Rosen, R. (2015). ‘The scream’: Meanings and excesses in early childhood settings. Childhood, 22(1), 39–52. Roth, A., & Fonagy, P. (2006). What works for whom? A critical review of psychotherapy research. The Guilford Press. Rustin, M. (1989). Observing infants: Reflections on methods. In L. Miller, L., M. Rustin, M. Rustin, & J. Shuttleworth (Eds.), Closely observed infants (pp. 52–78). Duckworth. Rustin, M. (2011). In defence of infant observational research. European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 13(2), 153–167. Rustin, M. (2014). The relevance of infant observation for early intervention: Containment in theory and practice. Infant Observation, 17(2), 97–114. Sandler, J., & Dreher, A. U. (1996). What do psychoanalysts want? The problem of aims in psychoanalytic therapy. Routledge. Sandler, J., Sandler, A. M., Davies, R., & Green, A. (Eds.) (2001). Clinical and observational psychoanalytic research: Roots of a controversy. Routledge. Shulman, G. (2019). Through the lens of infant observation: Some reflections on teaching infant observation and its applications to professionals working with infants. Infant Observation, 22(1), 4–20. Shuttleworth, J. (1989). Psychoanalytic theory and infant development. In L. Miller, L., M. Rustin, M. Rustin,  & J. Shuttleworth (Eds.), Closely observed infants (pp. 22–51). Duckworth. Slade, A., & Holmes, J. (2019). Attachment and psychotherapy. Current Opinion in Psychology, 25, 152–156. Smørholm, S. (2016). Pure as the angels, wise as the dead: Perceptions of infants’ agency in a Zambian community. Childhood, 23(3), 348–361. Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. J., & Klinnert, M. D. (1985). Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 21(1), 195. Stavchansky, L. (2018). Lacanian psychoanalysis between the child and the other: Exploring the cultures of childhood. Routledge. Steiner, R. (2000). Introduction. In J. Sandler, A. M. Sandler, & R. Davies (Eds.), Clinical and observational psychoanalytic research: Roots of a controversy (pp. 1–20). International Universities Press. Stern, D. N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant: A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. Basic Books. Stern, D. N. (2000). The relevance of empirical infant research to psychoanalytic theory and practice. In A. M. Sandler, R. Davies,  & J. Sandler (Eds.), Clinical

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and observational psychoanalytic research: Roots of a controversy (pp.  73–90). Routledge. Sternberg, J. (2005). Infant observation at the heart of training. Routledge. Thomson-Salo, F. (2014). Infant observation: Creating transformative relationships. Routledge. Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. C. (1977). Stages of small-group development revisited. Group & Organization Studies, 2(4), 419–427. Urwin, C. (1984). Power relations and the emergence of language. In J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn, & V. Walkerdine (Eds.), Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity (pp. 264–322). Methuen. Urwin, C. (2007). Doing infant observation differently? Researching the formation of mothering identities in an inner London borough. Infant Observation, 10(3), 239–251. Urwin, C., & Sternberg, J. (Eds.). (2012). Infant observation and research. Taylor & Francis. van der Horst, F. C. P. (2009, February 5). John Bowlby and ethology: A study of cross-fertilization. https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13467 van der Plas, C. S., Juárez-Salazar, E. M., Camarena, C. G.,  & Pavón-Cuéllar, D. (Eds.). (2022). The Marx through Lacan vocabulary: A compass for libidinal and political economies. Routledge. Walkerdine, V. (1987). No laughing matter: Girls comics and the preparation for adolescent sexuality. In J. Broughton (Ed.), Critical theories of psychological development (pp. 87–125). Springer. Watson, J. (1995). Guys and dolls: Exploratory repetition and maternal subjectivity in the fort/da game. American Imago, 52(4), 463–503. Wing, A. K., & Weselmann, L. (1999). Transcending traditional notions of mothering: The need for critical race feminist praxis. Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, 3, 257–282. Winship, G. (2001). Notes on the technique of psychoanalytic infant observation: A group-analytic training perspective. Group Analysis, 34(2), 253–266. Wolff, P. H. (1963). Observations on the early development of smiling. In B. Foss (Ed.), Determinants of infant behaviour II (pp. 113–167). Methuen. Wolff, P. H. (1967). The role of biological rhythms in early psychological development. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 31, 197–218. Wolff, P. H. (1996). The irrelevance of infant observations for psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44(2), 369–392.

7 RESISTING DEVELOPMENTALISMS

The final chapter of this part of the book starts with psychoanalysis and then situates this within cultural practices to find some alternatives to developmentalism. The previous chapters have reviewed and evaluated the relations between developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, including how each of these can subscribe to developmentalist assumptions. For if the developmentalist child of social policy could be said to operate in the future exterior, then developmentalist psychoanalysis works within the domain of the future interior (while, as discussed earlier, a properly antidevelopmentalist psychoanalysis engages the future anterior). I  have tried to identify some critical resources that hint at what antidevelopmentalism might look like, as well as indicate cultural and political pressures that make this an elusive phenomenon. While it would seem that imperatives towards imagining development continue full throttle, it is also worth recalling that interior design is itself a spectacle, a set of artefacts and illusions, a mode of impression management performed or addressed to (real or imagined) others, as much as it may also involve interiorisation of those norms. This chapter is structured in two halves. The first half revisits Freud, this time to consider his provocative exploration of adult desires and projections onto children and childhood, via the trope, ‘His Majesty the Baby’, whose colonial as well as gendered and classed features are rife (see also Gordon, 1997). Acknowledging this can help explore the psychic investments in imperialist developmentalism, as well as in children as expressions of adult desires. Having explored some of these psychic as well as policy investments inscribing notions of children and childhood, the second part of the chapter reviews some indicative alternative resources that show it is possible to counter developmentalism. DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-10

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‘His Majesty, the baby’: insider and outsider views

In his 1914 paper ‘On Narcissism’, Freud describes narcissism as central to an affective structure that tries to recapture the supposed (reconstructed, recollected) fantasy of idealised childhood. To quote the extract in full, he writes: The child shall have a better time than his parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which they have recognized as paramount in life. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more really be the centre and core of creation – “His Majesty the Baby”, as we once fancied ourselves. The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out – the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother. At the touchiest point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child. Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature. (Freud, 1914/1957, p. 91) There is so much in this extract that is worthy of reflection. But clearly what Freud is claiming here is that the child functions as the narcissistic object (of enjoyment, protection, achievement) of and for the parents, or what he describes as ‘the parents’ narcissism born again’. I suggest this could be extended to most, if not all, adult engagement with children and childhood. Indeed, it speaks of, and to, Chen’s (2010) second strategy for decolonisation that he discusses in Asia as Method and figures in its subtitle, de-imperialisation; that is, destabilising and undoing desires and investments that support and maintain imperialism. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this narcissism is understood not only as forged from adult responses to unmet desires or challenges (whether arising in childhood or adulthood), but it also bears the traces of the societal conditions in which those challenges were encountered. This is clearly evident (as indicated earlier) in Freud’s elaboration of the heteropatriarchal, gendered lines of fantasy investments on the part of the parents, as well as in his summary epithet that names narcissism as ‘His Majesty the Baby’. Such lines of fantasy were also evident in the scenarios laid out for the foetus in the ultrasound images discussed earlier. It is worth recalling that Freud’s phrase, ‘His Majesty, the baby’ was cited in English in Freud’s original text (which was of course written in German). It is thought to be a reference to a ‘well-known Royal Academy picture’ (as the footnote to Freud’s text puts it). The footnote goes on to suggest the picture

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is indicative ‘of the Edwardian age, which bore that title and showed two London policemen holding up the crowded traffic to allow a nurserymaid to wheel a perambulator across the street’ (Editorial Fn to Freud, 1914/1957, p.  91). Depicted here, therefore, is a staging of class and gender relations, from an imperial, colonial centre (London), that is put forward as exemplifying a parental fantasy of aristocratically high birth or status, or at least claiming the imaginary of one for their offspring. So, given significant transcultural and transhistorical continuities in the affection and aspirations of parents and other adults in children, as ‘our future’, as our better (lost?) selves, and so on, the question that arises is: how do we move beyond this imperial self, in the sense of visiting upon children what is actually to do with our own thwarted or unrealised desires, even as we also have to bring to our relations with children our hopes for them as well as us? As this part has shown, it will take some deliberate and committed reflection to decolonise the models of childhood inscribed in adult desires as well as in textbooks and (national and international) social and economic policies. To conclude Part II of this book, I will try to consider this further, via Freud’s formulation ‘His Majesty the baby’. His

Notably, in Freud’s formulation, the imperial subject is gendered as male, as ‘his majesty’. This may seem outdated given the ways girls and women are now typically portrayed as the saviours of humanity in international development policy (e.g. Koffman & Gill, 2013). Indeed, the neoliberal subject is feminised more generally, while the formerly triumphal androcentric position is now presented as endangered and threatened. This does not, of course, mean that models of economic development have suddenly become pro-­feminist but rather shows how a (liberal) feminist discourse has been co-opted to serve capitalist and colonial hegemonies. In any case, as indicated earlier, it could be argued that this threatened, fragile masculinity is precisely what feminist psychoanalysts have long asserted as a driver of individual development, with mastery and autonomy seen as a defense against the vulnerabilities, dependencies and relationalities associated with childhood, as well as with conventional modes of femininity, as well as the kinds of interdependencies now being reclaimed in critical disability studies. It is important to ask: whose and which masculinity is being protected? Addressing these questions includes attending to the work done by marking these as gendered distinctions in securing those subjectivities (and socio-­political ­objectivities) that are also central to colonial dynamics (Lugones, 2010). Majesty

Second, Freud’s naming of the elevated status of the subject in terms of ‘Majesty’ is a useful reminder of how, as Chen (2010) asserts, de-imperialisation

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must play a key part in the decolonial project. While ‘Majesty’ is suggestive of grand, indeed grandiose, ideas adults might secretly be harbouring, it also reproduces a particular, autocratic, model of the social. Moreover, just in case, reader, you are thinking this is only a ‘western’ product, North Korea, admittedly in its 1995 English language propaganda addressed to international audiences (that I happened to be given a copy of), mobilised an equivalent discourse, with a pamphlet title ‘Child is King’. As Millei and others have documented, claims about childhood and nation have figured powerfully within the political discourse on both sides of the Iron Curtain (Millei & Imre, 2016; Silova et al., 2018) as they also do currently (Millei, 2019). In terms of childhood, then, the de-imperialising move must involve disarticulating the presumed alignment between the constructions of ‘the baby’ or child, to attend instead to how such constructions have come to express the primary narcissism of the adult, and (what might inadequately be called) the Western and Westernised, heteropatriarchal colonial project. This colonial project continues in many guises, in the name of the imperative of growth, and of the demand for societies to develop in uniform ways. As mentioned earlier, a powerful evocation of this dynamic is elaborated by Lea Ypi in her memoir, Free, which describes growing up in Albania during the period of the end of communist rule from 1989 onwards and the introduction and incorporation into global capitalism (Ypi, 2021). (The title, Free, surely includes many ironies.) Towards the end of the book, she describes the influx of development ‘experts’ and ‘advisors’ who arrive to oversee the reorganisation of industries and (what we in the West now call) services. Her account offers poignant insights into what it feels like for one’s customs and practices to be subjected to these assessments and ‘adjustments’, and also – importantly – she offers a subaltern view of what those experts and their approaches look, and feel, like to the native population. In particular, Ypi discusses the reception of a World Bank functionary, Vincent Van de Berg, dubbed by locals as ‘the Crocodile’ because of the alligator logo on his branded tee shirts – although the implicit associations of this name with insincerity and hidden danger set in play turn out to be apposite. While Vincent’s job is to assimilate Albania into Europe, ordinary Albanians struggle to understand him and feel sorry for him. They find his refusal to integrate into the rhythm and cycles of their everyday life baffling, cannot understand why he seems embarrassed by their hospitality, or why he becomes incensed at being invited to join in the national dance. Yet a more insidiously undermining characteristic Ypi notes is how he could only relate to new experiences in terms of their parallel with some other place he had been: Of all the habits Van de Berg had, this was the one that perplexed people the most. He was never able to recall the exact names of the places he had seen, or the people he had met and the things he had done. . . . Whenever

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we suggested a new dish to try or a tourist site he might like to visit, or whenever we wanted to teach him a common word in our language, he welcomed the recommendation without surprise, thought of another experience he could compare it to, and let himself be guided without showing signs of disorientation (173) This lack of curiosity and disengagement seems to characterise a particular mode of developmentality, one that homogenises differences and strips away particularity. It indicates an imperial mindset that neither wants, nor feels the need, to know anything more. As Ypi puts it: ‘Replicability was Vincent’s secret weapon; the impression of déjá vu he conveyed was like a magic power, a trick that helped him to domesticate all that was new, to reduce the foreign to familiar categories’ (174). Van de Berg’s indifference and insulting rejection of local people’s wellmeaning efforts to share daily life pleasures and festivals with him goes beyond an individual trait – of perhaps the world-weary policy functionary. It exemplifies how global capitalism demands homogeneity and equivalence, in a way that not only fails to engage with people’s specificity of culture and practices, but in that process it both undermines and even denies people their identity and history. Surely, this is a narcissistic assault on a person’s sense of culture and societal belonging. The impacts of this developmentalist mindset therefore go way beyond surprise and a sense of rejection. Ypi explores how Albanians came to feel it must be their own fault for not knowing that there were other cultures or societies like theirs (since Vincent could only respond by way of making a parallel with another). She shows how this installed a further dynamic of disempowerment, of belittlement: We existed not as a product of our efforts but of the mercy of others, more powerful enemies perhaps, who had decided to let us be, whose marks of victory were a thousand smaller places in their own image, which all looked like one another, and all thought themselves to be different. (174) Such views from outside development’s centres are important. They help indicate not only the societal and cultural costs of economic ‘reforms’, in this case associated with postcommunist ‘integration’ into Europe, but also offer a glimpse of the psychic costs involved, for all – both coloniser and colonised. Even if Vincent completed his task, Ypi’s account shows that the model of subjectivity she and other Albanians were invited to subscribe to, to join, is – a bit like De Vos’ (2017) account discussed earlier of a psychology evacuated by neuroscience, but here expressly applied to the socioeconomic domain – empty.

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. . . the Baby

So, to come to the third part of Freud’s phrase, ‘the baby’, it is important to address how, of course, the child or the baby, is not singular, is not a ‘the’ or an ‘a’. This signals both a key problem and a key angle for resistance. Keeping ‘the baby’ in the singular may work to produce the site for the adult’s narcissistic projections, in a way that might be disrupted by acknowledging plural, diverse and shifting forms of infant and child positions and experiences. As an example, I  turn now to the subversive work done by Alma Gottlieb and Judy DeLoache’s (2016) edited collection A World of babies. Imagined childcare guides for eight societies.

Fabricated babies – fictional truths

‘Every truth has the structure of fiction’, Lacan declared in his seminar on Ethics (1992, p. 12). And so we move from Ypi’s (2021) subaltern truth to fiction as truth. Gottlieb and DeLoache’s (2016) A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Eight Societies does just that. It imagines, or fabricates, what childcare advice looks like for eight contemporary societies. Its practice of creative imagination, while initially arising as a tool to encourage students to write, works subversively to destabilise received truths about childcare, families and children. Or rather, it is truthful about the specific societies, attending to this specificity in a way that wards off normative, developmentalist explanations. The book undoes received norms not only about birthing and childcare practices but also about their stability and national-regional distributions. This fictional, or imagined, childcare advice is narrated with attention to impacts of migration arising from geopolitical instabilities, colonial legacies and – it should be said – colonial actualities, alongside the dynamics of cultural minoritisation these produce. It addresses readers’ preconceptions in a way that prompts interrogation of the truth claims of all supposedly ‘real’, as well as fabricated, norms and precepts. (And it should be noted that their book is based on anthropological and ethnographic research, even if its ‘characters’ and ‘authors’ – the childcare advisors – are composite fabrications.) What this example highlights is not only the epistemic violence structured into the abstraction of the multiplicity of forms of babyhood into ‘the baby’ but also how this recapitulates the political economic violence of the global North over the South (and the many norths and souths within the North and South). Similar dynamics of abstraction underlie the implied model of the social in that other dreadful over-used and unreflected-upon metaphor, the Baby and the Bathwater. Gottlieb has long been working to ward off developmentalist normalisations, especially in relation to childcare and cultural practices (see Gottlieb, 2004; Gottlieb et al., 2014). A World of Babies is based on extensive anthropological fieldwork which informs the construction of composite

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mothers and babies in each society, and credible, if also composite, culturally acknowledged experts. The book explicates the faux authoritative tone (p. 27) of the advice offered. The invented authors are based, for each example, on the kinds of people likely to provide childcare advice in those societies, whether a grandmother, a schoolteacher or a diviner. While the chapters ‘playfully mimic the authoritative tone of parenting guides dispensing advice as if it were universally applicable’ (27), the juxtaposition of equally prescriptive, equally vehement but often dramatically conflicting, advice is presented as working ‘to dispel any assumption of an Everybaby – or an Everyparent – who somehow exists outside culture. . . . The world of babies is truly many worlds’ (28). The book is notable for the ways each of the examples addresses the ways cultural practices around parenting and childrearing are both traversed and transformed by modernity. These transformations have included, via globalisation and migration, the impacts of violence and war, challenges of racism, including Islamophobia and antisemitism, and how in contexts of rapid social change (including in-country or cross-national migration) class and religiosity shift. All of these changes have generated intergenerational conflicts over childcare practices, alongside introducing great variability in state provision and policies around pregnancy, maternity, child health care and childcare that impact families. The book is notable also for the marked resistance to methodological nationalism (Chernilo, 2008, 2011) in the choice of examples, as many of the families are living as cultural, religious or national minorities within societies that marginalise their practices, and are often also racialised oppressed minorities, whose relationship to, and struggles to maintain, particular cultural-religious practices are therefore affectively and politically marked by this status. Chapters include exploring the experiences of giving birth to and caring for Guinean Muslim babies in Portugal; processes of navigating conflicting childcare advice in contemporary China (a context which has seen perhaps the most rapid and dramatic changes – including in childcare practices – in the world); the meanings and practices around the having and caring for children in occupied Palestine amid escalating (incitements to) violence; this is (perhaps diplomatically) followed by a focus on issues posed for Russian-Jewish immigrants in adapting to living in Israel/Palestine. There is a chapter addressing infant care in the context of post-civil war Côte D’Ivoire; Somali children being brought up in Minneapolis; complexities of linguistic and cultural practices for Andean children in post-civil war Peru; and, finally, exploration of negotiating Nordic norms for independence and equality alongside indigenous practices in the Faroe Islands which are an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Each chapter offers ‘advice’ on the various stages of pregnancy, delivery, feeding, sleeping times and arrangements, religious and community events,

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and much more. Each set of norms undermines the next, and so the process of reading this text destabilises the very notion of such norms. It is useful to be reminded that each society has acknowledged child-rearing experts – though in increasingly globalised contexts people are indeed often turning to published and online texts. A further assumption made is that such societies would have any desire to consult such experts, as well as that new mothers/parents/families might desire to maintain (some version of) their cultural practices of origin, even as they also recognise inevitable processes of change, either through geographical dislocation or through changing technologies and interpretations. Clearly, the relativism instituted by the juxtaposition of radically different claims, practices and beliefs about children and childcare arises from a committed ethical-political position: this works to counter spurious generalisations and cultural impositions or imperialisms around what is ‘right’ or ‘best’, normal or abnormal, for children and their families. This is antidevelopmentalism in action: the chapters resist abstracting practices around the bearing, birthing and caring for children from diverse cultural-political settings, which – moreover – are themselves portrayed as complex, shifting and changing, with those changes and shifts explicitly topicalised. In terms of the theme of this part of the book, Interior Design, it should be noted that A World of Babies is certainly not psychoanalytic: yet, in some sense it potentially does similar reflective, analytical work. The address is to the reader, who is the subject of analysis, rather than the cultural-familial practices being discussed. It is made clear that the eight imagined childcare guides are not intended as advice to actual members of those societies. Rather, they are intended to engage and educate Western-based audiences about such societies and family practices. In this sense, the text incites robust self-analysis of some of the most deeply held commitments about the ‘natures’ of children, parenting, childcare and development practices. But it does so in a very different way from the agonising self-absorption of analysing the ‘countertransference’ of developmentalist therapeutic professionals. And it certainly wards off any sense of hierarchisation or directionality about caregiving practices. As is the way with anthropological research, and like other critical uses of deconstructionist strategies, however, it is not (only) relativist; rather, alongside the attention to specificity (the focus of Part I, via Strathern’s, 1992, strategy of exemplification) the relativising moment is what prompts the realisation of the practices of power informing the dominant arrangements, and so enables their re-evaluation. Concluding Part II: too many, or no children?

It is time to draw this part to a close. In relation to Child as method, rather than struggling to find positions accorded child and children, it seems that

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the field of developmental psychology is populated by too many children. The four chapters in Part II have highlighted multiple imagined children (and babies, and even unborn children) constructed and produced by theory and policy, along with their complex mutual confirmations and inter-relations). These include the child as a future adult, the adult as a fixated child, the lost child, the real versus true child (Green, 2000), and the child as an interactional, retroactive construction (produced under transference, within the psychoanalytic relationship). Moreover, the discussion has also identified the observed infant, research(ed) infant, and the spectacular infant (of ultrasonography), even the ‘infant in the infant’ (Green, 2000). Yet, significantly, not all of these ‘children’ refer to actual children. In fact, the arguments reviewed in this chapter invite the question of whether any of them do. (As well as in what sense, ‘real’ children exist, especially to themselves.) Moreover, all of the various conceptions of child and childhood (including infancy) set in play involve key but different temporalities and spatialities. The temporalities are largely linear (whether forwards or backwards), or, as in the interactional child, relational and (in the case of psychoanalysis) looping. The contested status of space includes such debates as the relevance and relationship (if any) of what happens outside to what happens inside the analytic encounter (as in the discussion between Parker, 2010, and Frosh, 2010, and also Green’s 2000, comments about the importance Winnicott accorded to the analytic setting, 141). Questions of spatiality are also at play in the techno-spectacular cultural norms of individualism, and social abstraction of the developmental psychological experimental setting, intensified further via the dynamics of consumption and commodification incited and enacted by the ultrasound image. The issues posed by ultrasonography reflect long-standing Eurocentric cultural practices that privilege the visual (Jay, 2011; Jay & Ramaswamy, 2014), which are also inscribed into and reiterated by developmental psychology. These link vision to control, while, as Petchesky (1987) highlighted, ultrasound technology produces pedagogies and epistemologies of vision by teaching us how to see and what to see. Even notwithstanding this absence of embodied, material child(ren), beyond the non-psychoanalytic cultural examples (one memoir or biographical account, one fictional) discussed earlier, there are few glimpses of nondevelopmentalism or antidevelopmentalism. One version is the retroactively constructed, interactional child. Others are available via the generation of alternative pedagogies of reading technology, as in the ec-static child (Cannon, 2014); that is, noting rather than passing over or stabilising ambiguities, fluctuations, and oscillations and so exposing the interpretive and ideological practices underlying supposedly ‘obvious’ consensual claims. Foremost among these reading strategies is queer theory (Gill-Peterson et  al., 2016),

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but other resources for attending to multiple temporalities and spatialities of childhood are also available (Gavin, 2022). Throughout this part of the book, I have traced how psychoanalysis, originally understood as a counterhegemonic, subversive antidevelopmentalist resource, has – especially in Anglophone contexts – responded to the wider pressures of ‘evidence-based practice’ by becoming aligned with dominant neoliberal, governmental developmentalist policies, indeed claiming efficacy as a resource informing early intervention child development initiatives. Some versions of psychoanalysis have embraced this approach wholeheartedly (as in the Centre for Attachment Psychotherapy), enacting their understandings of evolution and natural selection in their strategies of adaptation. Others have, over the years, come to modify their rationale for infant observation as a compulsory and important feature of their training. Here, the rear-guard strategy to preserve developmentalism – particularly evident on the part of the Tavistock Clinic – appears to have involved shifting the unit of development, the developmental subject, from the child under observation to the training professional. After all, especially in a psychoanalytically oriented training, the trainee or student is understood to be ‘like a child’, and this status demands both pedagogical and analytical interventions: the trainee should reengage with their (responses to their) own childhoods in order to become an adequate therapist. Here the child remains an enduring link in developmentalist explanatory models: but transferred from infant to adult. As I have discussed elsewhere (Burman, 2019), this is a version of ‘therapeutic child’ that qualifies the adult, rather than engaging with or concerned with any embodied, living child. Moreover – as is the way with pedagogical imperatives – what this all too often leaves out is the institutional dynamics and politics of the training organisation and sociopolitical context. Significantly, where those are brought into question, as in the Ellis (1997) chapter discussed in Chapter  6, antidevelopmentalist sentiments and possibilities seem to arise that destabilise some of the foundational assumptions of the models. Thus, while an initially promising strategy seemed to be the shift from object to subject, as in the adult becoming the topic of inquiry and reflection, rather than the child, yet, as with discussions of teachable moments, and pedagogies of discomfort (Naas, 2014; Zembylas, 2018), this still risks reiterating a developmentalist subject if it is institutionalised. Moments of disturbance and disruption may be all we can hope for as genuinely developmental (rather than developmentalist). These are, perhaps, what Lacanians call the incursion of ‘the real’. The complex, perhaps tortuous twists and recuperations traced in this part from antidevelopmentalism to developmentalism, and back again, suggest that antidevelopmentalist desires, and strategies, are – perhaps necessarily – elusive and hard to pin down. This does, of course, recall the structure of desire (including the desire for development, that has been the focus here),

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which resists and escapes linearity and instrumentalisation. The interpretive readings emerging of the mobile and shifting relations between developmentalism and antidevelopmentalism as they inscribe positions accorded child and children perhaps might be understood as exemplifying Jacqueline Rose’s apposite formulation (that I have already quoted in previous work; Burman, 2013, pp.  57–58), addressed to the project of the framing of childhood in literature. She argued: I am using “desire” here in the sense of an act which is sought after or which might actually take place. . . . I am using desire to refer to a form of investment by the adult in the child, and to the demand by the adult on the child as the effect of that investment, a demand which fixes the child and then holds in place. A turning to the child, or a circulating around the child–what is at stake here is not so much something which could be enacted as something which cannot be spoken. (Rose, 1992, pp. 3–4) We need to speak of these developmentalist agendas and show how and where they inscribe practices of child – as other forms of – development. Psychology and psychoanalysis are both implicated in regimes of developmentalism. However, I have suggested that some psychoanalytic tenets and insights can be used to counter this. I will end this part with two claims. The first is that being critical of developmentalism does not mean denying development. That is, it is perhaps possible to hold onto the idea that early experiences are important and have some relationship with later life, without ignoring – as Wolff (1996) highlighted – how discontinuities are more frequently encountered and exhibited. Hence, continuity of relationships and affectional bonds is important (if not vital) and can be acknowledged without subscribing to the normativity of Bowlby and Fonagy and others’ versions of attachment theory, and its policy reflections (or motivations) in early intervention strategies that continue to figure powerfully in national and international policies. Second, taking development as a necessary and positive socio-cultural phenomenon, as something that happens rather than as a matter of social engineering, it is even possible to claim that much of institutionalised developmental psychology is in fact antidevelopmental, even if (and as) it is developmentalist, in the sense that it reifies structures as forms of knowledge that limit rather than enable. It is vital to remember, find and keep finding alternatives, to maintain momentum to counter escalating developmentalisms, and also to find spaces of resistance, both in the form of critical insights elaborated by those subjected to developmentalist policies (as in Ypi’s 2021 account) and speculatively incited by Gottlieb and DeLoache’s (2016) ‘eight societies’ book.

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References Burman, E. (2013). Desiring development? Psychoanalytic contributions to antidevelopmental psychology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(1), 56–74. Burman, E. (2019). Fanon, education, action: Child as method. Routledge. Cannon, K. L. (2014). Ec-statically queer images: Queering the photographic through fetal photography. Photography and Culture, 7(3), 269–283. Chen, K. H. (2010). Asia as method: Toward deimperialization. Duke University Press. Chernilo, D. (2008). A social theory of the nation-state: The political forms of modernity beyond methodological nationalism. Routledge. Chernilo, D. (2011). The critique of methodological nationalism: Theory and history. Thesis eleven, 106(1), 98–117. De Vos, J. (2017). The neuroturn in education: Between the Scylla of psychologization and the Charybdis of digitalization. In M. Vandenbroek, J. De Vos, W. Fias, L. M. Olsson, H. Penn, H., D. Wastell, & S. White (Eds.), Constructions of neuroscience in early childhood education (pp. 20–36). Routledge. Ellis, L. (1997). The meaning of difference: Race, culture and context in infant observation. In S. Reid (Ed.), Developments in infant observation: The Tavistock model (pp. 56–82). Routledge. Freud, S. (1914/1957). On narcissism: An introduction. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIV (1914–1916): On the history of the psycho-analytic movement, papers on metapsychology and other works (pp. 67–102). (Original work published 1914). Hogarth Press. Frosh, S. (2010). Psychoanalysis outside the clinic: Interventions in psychosocial studies. Bloomsbury Publishing. Gavin, K. M. (2022). Tangled sideways research: Reimagining temporality in research with children. Childhood, 29(2), 157–171. 09075682221094394. Gill-Peterson, J., Sheldon, R., & Stockton, K. B. (2016). What is the now, even of then? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 22(4), 495–503. Gordon, L. R. (1997). Her majesty’s other children: Sketches of racism from a neocolonial age. Rowman & Littlefield. Gottlieb, A. (2004). The afterlife is where we come from. University of Chicago Press. Gottlieb, A., & DeLoache, J. S. (2016). A world of babies: Imagined childcare guides for eight societies. Cambridge University Press. Gottlieb, A., Otto, H.,  & Keller, H. (2014). Is it time to detach from attachment theory? Perspectives from the West African rain forest. In A. Gottlieb, H. Otto, & H. Keller (Eds.), Different faces of attachment: Cultural variations on a universal human need (pp. 187–214). Cambridge University Press. Green, A. (2000). Science and science fiction in infant research. In J. Sandler, A. M. Sandler, & R. Davies (Eds.), Clinical and observational psychoanalytic research: Roots of a controversy (pp. 41–72). International Universities Press. Jay, M. (2011). In the realm of the senses: An introduction. The American Historical Review, 116(2), 307–315. Jay, M., & Ramaswamy, S. (Eds.). (2014). Empires of vision: A reader. Duke University Press.

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Koffman, O., & Gill, R. (2013). ‘The revolution will be led by a 12-year-old girl’: Girl power and global biopolitics. Feminist Review, 105(1), 83–102. Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759. Millei, Z. (2019). Pedagogy of nation: A concept and method to research nationalism in young children’s institutional lives. Childhood, 26(1), 83–97. Millei, Z., & Imre, R. (Eds.) (2016). Childhood and nation: Interdisciplinary engagements. Palgrave. Naas, M. (2014). The end of the world and other teachable moments: Jacques Derrida’s final seminar. Fordham University Press. Parker, I. (2010). Lacanian psychoanalysis: Revolutions in subjectivity. Routledge. Petchesky, R. P. (1987). Fetal images: The power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction. Feminist Studies, 13, 263–292. Rose, J. (1992). The case of Peter Pan or the impossibility of children’s fiction. Palgrave Macmillan. Silova, I., Piattoeva, N., & Millei, Z. (2018). Childhood and schooling in (post)socialist societies: memories of everyday life. Palgrave. Strathern, M. (1992). After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Wolff, P. H. (1996). The irrelevance of infant observations for psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44(2), 369–392. Ypi, L. (2021). Free: A child and a country at the end of history. Penguin. Zembylas, M. (2018). Affect, race, and white discomfort in schooling: Decolonial strategies for ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Ethics and Education, 13(1), 86–104.

PART III

Landscaped worlds Materialism, child and the more-than-human

8 READING MATERIALISMS

Part III explores how Child as method engages with a range of debates on materialisms and human–matter relations. By ‘more-than-human’ I  signal discussions of human–animal and human–technology relations, as well ecologies of living (and dead) matter that include humans among many others. I suggest Child as method can offer a specific lens through which to engage these discussions that span considerations of varieties of humanisms (bourgeois, radical, Eurocentric and postcolonial/indigenous), and cross a range of disciplines (geography, postcolonial studies, feminist and queer studies and social theory more generally) as well as in psychological, educational and childhood studies. In this chapter, I  engage the debates about materialism, old and new, through a focus on things, or matter. To matter is, of course, to be composed of, engage with, inter- and intra-act with the material world, the world of materials including material culture and its physico-biological qualities and components. To matter also means to be important and to carry ethico-political significance. Both understandings of matter and mattering are indissolubly interwoven, materially and symbolically. Child as method addresses questions of both political economy (economics at the level of national and transnational relations), and their geopolitical attributions, distributions and intensities. It specifically aims to interrogate the unequally organised relationalities set in play as they intersect with materialities and imaginaries constellated around children and childhoods, both where these are explicitly topicalised and also as implicated implicitly via other foci and agendas. Child as method also attends to modes and orders of spatialities and temporalities as they are mobilised and organised around intergenerational relationships.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-12

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As such, this part concerns the relations between Child as method and debates on materialism. I will review and evaluate relations between so-called new and older varieties of materialism. I will attempt to reconcile some of the antagonisms between these and demonstrate alignments and mutualities through some quite extensive consideration of works by the writers Georges Perec and José Saramago, using this to inform this discussion of materialisms through the lens of Child as method. Materialism, labour and sustainability

However, before I move into this, perhaps rather niche set of debates, there are of course other discussions of materialism to take into account. These include so-called ‘immaterial labour’ (Lazzarato, 1996) or what might otherwise be called cognitive (which is really affective) capitalism (MoulierBoutang, 2011). This analysis in fact is of a very material process, designated ‘immaterial’ because of the ways in which people become further alienated from their bodies and other social relations by virtue of changes in forms of labour under late capitalism, notably so-called knowledge-based economies, sometimes called cognitive capitalism to mark the rise of new technologies. It is also feminised since communication and relationship skills, and the presentation of (positive) emotions are required (Morini, 2007), as Hochschild’s (1983) discussions of emotional labour made clear and still remain relevant (Brook et al., 2013). Under these conditions, work is further atomised as well as disembodied (as in workers in call centres servicing transnational clients), while emotions and relationships are instrumentalised as integral to the job (whether as ‘relationship managers’ in banks – thanks, Steve at Santander, for my Christmas card – or baristas in coffee shops). Just to introduce a little continuity or inter-textuality to the later concerns of this part, it is worth noting that the text by Perec that I particularly focus on, Les Choses/Things was in fact first published (in 1965) at the dawn of the new discipline of market research, and the author himself worked as a research assistant to Henri Lefèbre, interviewing people to document their views of culture and artefacts and administering questionnaires, an experience that clearly informs the book. As well as exploring the enabling features of structure and constraints in his writing, Perec certainly was alive to the alienating and frustrating aspects of everyday work conditions, as depicted in his celebrated text L’art et la manière d’aborder son chef de service pour lui demander une augmentation/The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise (Perec, 2008/2011), which is set out as a cybernetic flow chart, that, despite its complexity and persistence, nevertheless in the end never gets anywhere. Similarly, the main characters of Les Choses, Jérôme and Sylvie, in their flattened subjectivities, appear to have become so largely because of the empty nature of their work. Making a living from documenting social stratifications

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of forms of consumption is shown to enter into the structuring of their own aspirations and dissatisfactions. They have become thingified (as in a Marxist understanding of alienation, as well as a Fanonian understanding). Similarly, Saramago’s civil servant in the story ‘Things’, in the collection Objectos Quase (1978) (translated as The Lives of Things, 2012), which I analyse in Chapter  10, who processes requests for objects on the basis of the social ranking of the applicant, is subject to and depersonalised by the system that he serves. In Lazzarato’s (1996) account, the ideological shift towards centralising communication processes offers some possibilities for new forms of political engagement and mobilisation, as is also proposed by Trott (2017), and digital communities have certainly since indicated. The role of such processes in structuring new forms of childhood and relationships to, with, and by children is now well documented (see, e.g. Danby et al., 2018), as both reproducing old forms of intra-familial assumptions and constructions of childhood and initiating new normalisations, including challenges to gender and generational categories and transformations (Gordo López et al., 2015; GillPeterson, 2015a, 2015b) such that a further Child as method-inflected analysis of such processes is surely superfluous here. A final introductory comment on uses and forms of material and materialism concerns the discussion of ‘dematerialisation’ circulating in ecology and economic degrowth discussions (Lorek, 2014). The term refers to the need to reduce the materials serving production and consumption processes in order to preserve the planet. It is put forward as a measure of ‘how (much) our social metabolism has to decrease’ (83) with the aim of addressing the source of our environmental problems. The term is extended to highlight the need to reduce consumption of potentially renewable resources, such as fish and timber, which are also currently being used unsustainably. The term dematerialisation is typically used in conjunction with another key term in the degrowth lexicon, ‘decoupling’, which concerns the economy and its activities whereas dematerialisation refers to (dwindling) planetary capacities and limits. Hence, ‘Dematerialization’ is the demand for ‘an absolute decoupling, i.e. an absolute reduction in material and carbon use’ (83). Dematerialisation is therefore an intervention within material relations and forms of production. Since dematerialisation and growth are economically incompatible, ‘substantial degrowth is necessary to reduce our social metabolism to a sustainable steady state level’ (84). Such national level or macro-economic discussions may seem far from childhood concerns, but children are of course a major focus of and for consumption as well as production, in the care and regulation of their bodies and their minds (with the uncompostable mountains of disposable nappies only one small example). While degrowth economists discuss caps on the consumption of raw materials as a necessary politically sanctioned way to

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push for such degrowth, the question of how else and how best to provide for children and a growing world population’s needs is on the agenda. It should be noted that degrowth advocates rarely subscribe to arguments in favour of limiting population by supporting proposals to restrict reproductivity (the having of babies and children). This would become a human rights issue that would deepen already existing global and local inequalities and access to privilege. Such considerations also reiterate the instrumentalisation of children and childhood as part of the wider narrative and technology of developmentalism, which would surely take degrowth advocates in precisely the direction they want to avoid. For the purposes of the concerns of this chapter, discussions of dematerialisation, like immaterialism, in fact are very material indeed. This returns us to the main focus of this part of the book, materialism. New materialism in childhood and educational studies

Recent discussions in childhood and educational studies have substantially drawn upon new materialist perspectives, particularly as they engage the contested status of the child at the borders of human and animal, as well as subject and environment (Taylor, 2013). New materialism (especially in its feminist varieties) is, we are told, concerned with the relationship between nature and culture, turn(s) to matter, distributive agency and privileging relations, prioritizing affect, and a movement away from the linguistic turn and representationalism. These entangled threads disrupt common orientations to research methodology and decenter humanism in a variety of ways. (Truman, 2019a, page 3 of 13, emphasis original) These approaches have also been informed by decolonial and postcolonial analyses and indigenous studies’ attention to the discretionary allocations of humanity (Cannella  & Viruru, 2004; Pacini-Ketchabaw  & MacAlpine, 2022). The child has variously shared in the subordinate or devalued status accorded women, the mad, queer, differently abled and others marginalised, excluded or rejected from Eurocentric models of ‘civilisation’, notably colonised populations, the poor and working classes – and increasingly those disposable de-humanised peoples rendered casualties of racial capitalism (Melamed, 2011; Gerrard et al., 2022). Or else the child, and its correlates – the developing (educational) subject – have been recruited into these ­development projects as matter to be worked upon and moulded in its ­service (Burman, 2020; Klein  & Mills, 2017). Informed by such decolonial, critical perspectives, child as method takes seriously the constitutive character of these exclusions and mobilisations in producing and maintaining but

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also warding off (demurring from, re-working, even perhaps resisting) such dynamics (Burman, 2019). Discussions of (so-called) new materialism have been especially useful in providing detailed documentation and conceptualisation of the complex relations between human and non-human actors and contexts, offering new languages that transcend the legacies of dualist, solipsistic ideas structured into European-influenced globalised social theories (Fox & Alldred, 2018; Truman, 2019a; Davies, 2020; Diaz-Diaz & Semenec, 2020). Notions of intraaction, entanglement, as well as Haraway’s (2003) discussion of companion species decentre dominant Eurocentric models of subjectivity and invite or usher in attentive, relational and nuanced understandings of human engagement with more-than-human contexts (Zembylas, 2018; Snaza et al., 2014; Siddiqui, 2016). Typically, these mobilise so-called flattened ontologies that recognise and restore agentic powers to matter and render human authorities and activities correspondingly lesser and more contingent, and subject to contextual relations. Acknowledging the vitality of matter (Bennett, 2010) and agential realism (Barad, 2003) have ushered in a range of new ways of seeing and understanding complex (but unequal) mutualities and dependencies as well as co-constructions (Latimer & Miele, 2013), which have been enormously generative for childhood and educational practice as well as for methodological approaches in the social sciences, including but not only for environmental education (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018; Kraftl, 2020). New materialism and (de)colonial critiques

Alongside these, postcolonial and decolonial critiques have challenged incipient generalisation and abstraction attending the new materialist literature studies, arguing that advocates seeking to divest the human of its excessive authority over and exploitation of nature, land and ecosystems both presume too much and too precipitously overlook how colonised and other oppressed groups have not yet been accorded that very ‘human’ status (Huang, 2017; Leong, 2016). As such, new materialist approaches have been accused of reproducing White theory in the sense of failing to recognise the history and ongoing enactment of anti-blackness (Jackson, 2015, 2020), and educational systems which fail to recognise this may inadvertently reproduce colonial dynamics (Desai & Sanya, 2016; Zembylas, 2018). As Leong argues, ‘challenges to human exceptionalism should proceed through a critique of race, or we risk reorganizing old privileges (“All Lives”) under new standards of being (“Matter”)’ (24). More than this, the focus on the liveliness and activity of matter has also attracted claims of underplaying researcher agency (Petersen, 2018), while the generalised character of new materialist claims has been seen as insufficiently attentive to the diversity of human positionings and especially how

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planetary and environmental insecurities are racially structured in ways that reproduce and even intensify former colonial relations. This arises in part because of the orientation of new materialist approaches towards description rather than transformation, which can generate a conservative (with a small ‘c’) perspective. As Leong (2016) suggests, ‘The limits of a new materialist ethics appear most forcefully, then, as we attempt to move from an embodied “responsiveness” to the dislocation of structures’ (11), while, second this misreads and reifies sociopolitical structures such as racialisation: ‘.  .  . the framing of the new materialisms as inherently more ethical generates, and is generated by, a disavowal or misreading of race as a stagnant analytical framework’ (ibid., 12). Other ways into these discussions have proved important. Frantz Fanon, and Fanonian studies, have brought renewed attention to contextualised, in particular racialised, understandings of embodiment and the relations between affect and materiality, subjectivity and geopolitics (Gibson, 2011; Gordon, 2005; Hook, 2020; Burman, 2019). In particular, recent commentators have taken up Sylvia Wynter’s development of Fanon’s assertion of sociogeny over ontogeny, or what she calls the ‘sociogenic principle’ (Wynter, 2001). Wynter’s panoramic overview of the cultural canon of European modernity from its origins highlights its racialised and gendered exclusionary inscriptions (Wynter, 2003). Her attention to the poetics, or affective technologies, that this institutes chimes well with recent approaches to affect theory and decolonisation (Truman, 2019b). Faithful to Fanon’s key insights, Wynter highlights the gendered intersections in the semiotic processes of cultural normalisation at work. Such discussions of materialism therefore converge with the ‘affective turn’ in social theory that sees the body, its appetites, responses and indeed visceralities as sites for interrogation, as arenas through which sexed, gendered, classed (caste) and colonial processes are not only played out but also (as Fanon highlights) metabolised, or even subverted (Khanna, 2020). Wynter’s analyses have been influential in highlighting the gendered and heterosexed as well as racialised inscription of dominant models of subjectivity (Gordon, 2011; Jackson, 2015, 2020; Muñoz, 2015) with pedagogical and educational implications attracting increasing recognition (Parker, 2018; Truman, 2019b; Zembylas, 2022). Wynter, following Fanon’s claims for a radical (i.e. not bourgeois, liberal) humanism, argues for a renewal of humanity, rather than its deconstruction or destruction (Wynter, 2003). Beyond Haraway’s (2004) ‘we have never been human’ (which subverts Latour’s, 2012, claim that ‘we have never been modern’), these critical perspectives usher in nuanced attention to global racialised, classed, gendered and heterosexed relationalities that demonstrate how colonialism as such is actually far from over. Such work highlights how it is particular, racialised bodies

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that are selectively exposed to environmental hazards, or, worse, rendered as testing populations for medical and reproductive technologies – whether from pesticides in Martinique (Agard-Jones, 2013) or the ways the plastic in the seas is a racialised issue, affecting the Global South more than the North (Huang, 2017; Liboiron, 2021). These geopolitical and political perspectives have nuanced the calls to shed humanity, by highlighting historical and current inhumanities at play, instead demanding the restoration, or rather the elaboration, of a humanism built from resources other than masculinist Western Enlightenment, including indigenous and Southern knowledges (Connell, 2014, 2020). Having reviewed these arguments, my approach in this Part of the book departs from these discussions in the sense of both drawing on and tracing a different route to address them. This is because many of the arguments at play within current discussions have significant but generally unacknowledged antecedents. For example, as well as engaging with deconstructionist arguments as demonstrating the historicity and contingency of prevailing knowledge systems, feminists pointed out long ago the injustice of demands to dismantle the subject just when women and other marginalised groups were approaching being able to access some of its entitlements and privileges (Jackson, 1992/3). Similarly, I have been struck by how – notwithstanding the creativity, perspicacity and profundity of many current discussions around new materialism, including those forging some rapprochement or compatibility with animal studies and indigenous and decolonial perspectives (e.g. Pedersen, 2011), these typically overlook or fail to mention Marxist approaches; that is, historical materialism. The other to ‘new’ materialism is, presumably, ‘old’ materialism; but in presuming to have supplemented or surpassed this, the latter’s contributions have literally been rendered unmentionable. This includes much valuable, insightful and important work. Further, to avoid or ‘forget’ the analytical basis from which current debates from been generated is surely counter to any materialist framework (old or new). Consistent with a Child as method attention to political economic considerations, I  suggest that, notwithstanding its limitations (that form the rationale for these new varieties, perhaps), the Marxist focus on labour, and both forms and relations of production, now under what such accounts currently name as racial capitalism, late capitalism, or neoliberal conditions remains as relevant as ever – whether as applied to the moving, or restrictions on moving, of bodies, ‘goods’ (products, commodities) or questions of the preservation or destruction of ecosystems. There are some exceptions, of course; Haraway is a notable example of a theorist who mobilises a Marxist sensibility attentive to questions of labour and production alongside her feminist ecological analyses.

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A wilfully, necessarily representational approach

For this reason, a key concern of these chapters is how old and new materialisms might enrich and inform each other. Despite initial reservations, I have come to accept, indeed I am persuaded by, Kraftl’s (2020) rationale for the use of the terminology of the nonrepresentational – as de-emphasising the role of cultural-linguistic frameworks, rather than denying their necessary mediation in human apperception and engagement. Yet, still, in tracing through the workings of different materialist frameworks, I  am drawn to explore these through cultural – specifically literary-representations, in this case writing by Georges Perec (1936–1982) and José Saramago (1922–2010). In taking this resolutely representational approach, I am following a line of argument charted by literary theorists of childhood who have kept a vigilant eye on how claims to an essentialised and naturalised child and childhood can remain. Cocks (2014) outlines his strategy for identifying ‘the peripheral child’ alongside – and as a necessary obverse perhaps – of the canonical versions inhabiting nineteenth-century English literature as follows: My claim is that there is no knowable ‘real’ child waiting in the darkness for its coming to light, and that the return itself is not, again, of an object. Instead, the peripheral child returns to these texts as a reading: an engagement with, and in, language. It is the reading that produces the child as neglected, in other words, neglect being a deferred action, its meaning projected backwards. On these terms, language and reading are not secondary to that which is returned, but constitutive of it. (8) In a similar vein, but offering a further relevant cautionary note – since so much of the current childhood and educational engagement with new materialisms is informed by environmentalist concerns, Lesnik-Oberstein (2023, in press) concludes her critique of ecocritical theory with the comment: A great deal of ecocriticism and environmental activism remains adamant that affective representation and communication are central to their project. However, the certainty and mastery which is offered by such knowledges of representation carries the risk of collusion with that drive to mastery which produced the environmental crises in the first place. In what follows, I present readings of some of Perec’s and Saramago’s texts not despite, but precisely because of, their fabricated basis. I  take these as a strong case for reading cultural-political situatedness within specific geopolitical contexts and historical moments; that is, as offering material relevant for a materialist analysis. This could be understood as an ancillary

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reading inspired by similar Fanonian political sentiments to those provided by Wynter. That is, in this chapter, rather than framing my arguments and analyses around some current empirical material concerning children and childhoods (as many authors in childhood and educational studies do, and as well as I have done elsewhere; Burman, 2022), I discuss some fictional texts as a means to explore particular framings of materialism. Wynter’s overview of the founding cultural formations of modern thought surely warrants exploration of fictional, literary texts as much as philosophical ones, as intellectual and affective anchors of ways of thinking and living. My focus on these two authors, Perec and Saramago, is of course not arbitrary. Clearly, attending to texts by two well-known twentieth-century cisgendered as male, heterosexually identified authors from Europe (each of whose first experiences of penetrative sex was purchased, as Saramago notes in his memoir and Bellos documents in his biography of Perec, Bellos, 2010) risks reproducing structures of cultural privilege and recentres European modernity. Nevertheless, again precisely because of this status, I  aim to show how these two authors’ philosophical and political commitments indicate crucial and critical reflections on these conditions, as well as recapitulating their problems. I also undertake the detailed readings outlined in Chapters  9 and 10 as an oblique but hopefully helpful route to reconcile some of the spurious polarisations structuring current debates about forms of materialism circulating in the social and human sciences. Further, these authors’ political commitments and reflections upon and interventions with their own geopolitical locations may also offer insights and inspiration for transformational strategies. That is, I will suggest that attending to these representations may prompt some more fruitful, that is, less polarised, analyses of human–nonhuman relations that can help inform the kinds of claims that need to be made for materialist analyses – both ‘old’ and ‘new’. Alongside, and as part of this project, I will also illustrate what Child as method can add to these discussions. I will now offer a more detailed rationale for the focus on these authors and these works. Why Perec and Saramago

I will take up the interrogation of forms of materialism primarily via consideration of two different, apparently fictional accounts, produced by these two different authors. I then return to the debates about materialisms in the final chapter of the book, Chapter 11. The first text I consider, Les Choses/ Things (Perec, 1965/1967) by Georges Perec, explores materiality in the form of things as possessions, not only as commodities produced by and in the service of capitalism, but also the psychic dynamics (of aspiration, desire, emulation) they signify, and the forms of generational and class identities

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and subjectivities constellated around and enacted through them. The second text, Saramago’s The Lives of Things/Objecto Quase (1978/2012), I read for his attentiveness to the vitality of matter, its autonomy (from human determination), if not exercising intrinsic intentionality. The different philosophical orientations of these two authors are also considered, in relation to both their biographies and sociopolitical contexts. Notwithstanding their differences (of national context, native language, and stylistic preoccupations), both authors are profoundly materialist in their analyses, attuned to class and capitalist relations (and more). In fact, the two texts I consider in more detail here are each framed by quotations from Marx. Perec includes as an epilogue to Les Choses a statement he attributes to Marx: ‘The means is as much part of the truth as the result. The quest for truth must itself be true, the true quest is the unfurling of a truth whose different parts combine in the result’. In the context of truth claims, ‘means’ and ‘result’ invite consideration of alienation, which is very much a concern of Les Choses. (This chimes with Hood & Newman’s, 2011 Marxist activist reading of Vygotsky.) Moreover, this statement invites reflection on the challenge posed by reading Perec’s text, where demands are made on the reader to arrive at their own interpretation of the meaning of the story. An equivalent, if more obviously marked, destabilisation of authorial control is indicated by Saramago stylistically, in his discursive and often overtly selfcontradicting and reflexive narrative form, as well as topicalised in the plot and subject matter of his stories, many of which explore the ambiguities, instabilities, unreliability, and corresponding responsibilities, of historiography (Salzani, 2018). Saramago’s The Lives of Things opens with Marx and Engels’ statement (from The Holy Family): ‘If man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human’ (9), so foregrounding the co-constitutive contingency and relationality of human–nonhuman conditions, with a focus on the urgent project to transform as well as reconsider its boundaries. It would be anachronistic to categorise these two authors as either humanist, antihumanist, or posthumanist, since they were writing before such debates arose (though Saramago was certainly critiquing neoliberalist capitalist relations), and each mobilised what would later be understood as postmodernist literary devices (and indeed characterise or innovated some of these). Instead, what is more fruitful, and perhaps (I suggest) more aligned with Fanonian and Wynterian discussions, is to explore what kind of humanism they depict. Indeed, in their dystopian counterfactual explorations, they may help show how the binary between idealism and materialism may be more permeable or in need of nuance than is typically presumed. Indeed, as I will discuss later, even Marxist, historical materialist analyses prefer what Lenin called ‘Intelligent idealism’ to ‘stupid materialism’ (Lenin, 1915). On the way, some consequences may be encountered for Child as method.

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References Agard-Jones, V. (2013). Bodies in the system. Small Axe: A  Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 17(3), 182–192. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Bellos, D. (2010). Georges Perec: A life in words. Random House. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. Brook, P., Koch, G.,  & Wittel, A. (2013). Thirty years after Hochschild’s ‘Managed Heart’: Exploring the commodity frontier. Culture and Organization, 19(4), 275–282. Burman, E. (2019). Fanon, education, action: Child as method. Routledge. Burman, E. (2020). Developments: Child, image, nation (2nd ed.). Routledge. Burman, E. (2022). Found childhood as a practice of child as method. Children’s Geographies, 20(3), 271–283. Cannella, G., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization. Routledge. Cocks, N. (2014). The peripheral child in nineteenth century literature and its criticism. Springer. Connell, R. (2014). Using southern theory: Decolonizing social thought in theory, research and application. Planning Theory, 13(2), 210–223. Connell, R. (2020). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Routledge. Danby, S., Fleer, M., Davidson, C., & Hatzigianni, M. (Eds.). (2018). Digital childhood. Technologies and children’s everyday lives. Springer. Davies, B. (2020). Entanglement in the world’s becoming and the doing of new materialist inquiry. Routledge. Desai, K.,  & Sanya, B. N. (2016). Towards decolonial praxis: Reconfiguring the human and the curriculum. Gender and Education, 28(6), 710–724. Diaz-Diaz, C., & Semenec, P. (2020). Posthumanist and new materialist methodologies: Research after the child. Springer. Fox, N. J., & Alldred, P. (2018). Social structures, power and resistance in monist sociology: (New) materialist insights. Journal of Sociology, 54(3), 315–330. Gerrard, J., Sriprakash, A., & Rudolph, S. (2022). Education and racial capitalism. Race Ethnicity and Education, 25(3), 425–442. Gibson, N. C. (2011). Introduction: Living Fanon? In N. C. Gibson (Ed.), Living Fanon (pp. 1–10). Palgrave Macmillan Gill-Peterson, J. (2015a). Sexting girls: Technological sovereignty and the digital. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 25(2), 143–156. Gill-Peterson, J. (2015b). The value of the future: The child as human capital and the neoliberal labor of race. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 43(1/2), 181–196. Gordo López, A. J., Contreras, P. P., & Cassidy, P. (2015). The [not so] new digital family: Disciplinary functions of representations of children and technology. Feminism & Psychology, 25(3), 326–346. Gordon, L. (2011). Fanon and development: A philosophical look. In L. Keita (Ed.), Philosophy and African development: Theory and practice (pp. 69–86). Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa [CODESRIA]. Gordon, L. R. (2005). Through the zone of nonbeing a reading of black skin, white masks in celebration of Fanon’s eightieth birthday. The CLR James Journal, 11(1), 1–43.

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Haraway, D. J. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. J. (2004). We have never been human. Retrieved December  2, 2022, from http://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/6848 Hochschild, A. R. (1983/2003). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press. Hood, L.,  & Newman, F. (2011). Tool and results: Understanding, explaining and meaning (three sides of one dialectical coin. In I. Parker (Ed.), Critical psychology (Vol. IV, pp. 41–76). Routledge. Hook, D. (2020). Fanon via Lacan, or: Decolonization by psychoanalytic means . . .? Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 51(4), 305–319. Huang, M. N. (2017). Ecologies of entanglement in the great pacific garbage patch. Journal of Asian American Studies, 20(1), 95–117. Jackson, S. (1992/3). The amazing deconstructing woman. Trouble and Strife, 25, 25–32. Jackson, Z. I. (2015). Theorizing queer inhumanisms (outer worlds: The persistence of race in movement “beyond the human”). GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), 209–248. Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human. New York University Press. Khanna, N. (2020). The visceral logics of decolonization. Duke University Press. Klein, E., & Mills, C. (2017). Psy-expertise, therapeutic culture and the politics of the personal in development. Third World Quarterly, 38(9), 1990–2008. Kraftl, P. (2020). After childhood: Re-thinking environment, materiality and media in children’s lives. Routledge. Latimer, J., & Miele, M. (2013). Naturecultures? Science, affect and the non-human. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(7–8), 5–31. Latour, B. (2012). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press. Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labor. In P. Virno,  & M. Hardy (Eds.), Radical thought in Italy: A  potential politics (pp.  133–147). University of Minnesota Press. Lenin, V. I. (1915). Conspectus of Hegel’s book. Lectures on the history of philosophy. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/cons-lect/ch03.htm Leong, D. (2016). The mattering of Black lives: Octavia Butler’s hyperempathy and the promise of the new materialisms. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2(2), 1–35. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (2023, in press) Literature, literary pedagogy, and extinction rebellion (XR): The case of Tarka the Otter. In J. Parham (Ed.), The literature and politics of the environment. Boydell and Brewer. Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is colonialism. Duke University Press. Lorek, S. (2014). Dematerialization. In G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, & G. Kallis (Eds.), Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era (pp. 83–85). Routledge. Melamed, J. (2011). Represent and destroy: Rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. University of Minnesota Press. Morini, C. (2007). The feminization of labour in cognitive capitalism. Feminist Review, 87(1), 40–59. Moulier-Boutang, Y. (2011). Cognitive capitalism. Polity. Muñoz, J. E. (2015). Theorizing queer in humanisms: The sense of brownness. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2), 209–210.

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Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & MacAlpine, K. A. (2022). Queer synthetic curriculum for the Chthulucene: Common worlding waste pedagogies. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 8(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36598 Parker, E. A. (2018). The human as double bind: Sylvia Wynter and the genre of “man”. JSP: Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 32(3), 439–449. Pedersen, H. (2011). Release the moths: Critical animal studies and the posthumanist impulse. Culture, Theory and Critique, 52(1), 65–81. Perec, G. (1965/1967). Things: A story of the sixties. Grove Press (first published as Les Choses, Julliard Press). Perec, G. (2008/2011). L’art et la manière d’aborder son chef de service pour lui demander une augmentation. Hachette/The art of asking your boss for a raise (D. Bellos, Trans.). Verso. Petersen, E. B. (2018). ‘Data found us’: A critique of some new materialist tropes in educational research. Research in Education, 101(1), 5–16. Salzani, C. (2018). Correcting history: Apocalypticism, messianism and Saramago’s philosophy of history. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 19–37). Springer. Saramago, J. (1978/2012). Objecto Quase/The lives of things (G. Pontiero, Trans.). Verso. Siddiqui, J. (2016). Restyling the humanities curriculum of higher education for posthuman times. Curriculum Inquiry, 46(1), 62–78. Snaza, N., Applebaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J., & Weaver, J. (2014). Toward a posthumanist education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 39–55. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Routledge. Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. Routledge. Trott, B. (2017). Affective labour and alienation: Spinoza’s materialism and the sad passions of post-Fordist work. Emotion, Space and Society, 25, 119–126. Truman, S. E. (2019a). Feminist new materialisms. In P. A. Atkinson, S. Delamont, M. A. Hardy, & M. Williams (Eds.), The SAGE encyclopedia of research methods. Sage. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036 Truman, S. E. (2019b). Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 110–128. Wynter, S. (2001). Towards the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be ‘Black.’ In M. F. Durón-Cogan & A. Gómez-Moriana (Eds.), National identities and sociopolitical changes in Latin America (pp. 30–66). Routledge. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Zembylas, M. (2018). The entanglement of decolonial and posthuman perspectives: Tensions and implications for curriculum and pedagogy in higher education. Parallax, 24(3), 254–267. Zembylas, M. (2022). Sylvia Wynter, racialized affects, and minor feelings: Unsettling the coloniality of the affects in curriculum and pedagogy. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 54(3), 336–350.

9 PEREC Children will be running along a white road

As introduced in Chapter 8, as authors, both Perec and Saramago engage a kind of critical humanism (as well as forms of anti or posthumanism) that espouses a materialism attentive to the framing, shaping and active agentic capacities of both humans and nonhumans (taking the nonhuman to mean both animate and inanimate, both living and (apparently) dead matter, and technologies, artefacts and scenes framing these). Both authors are profoundly suspicious of designated forms of authority, whether institutions, governments, or transnational bodies. While each is concerned with subjective capacities and formations – desires, relationships, forms of embodiment and movement, personal expression and transformation – they share a philosophical and political commitment to warding off teleology, even in the form of envisioning utopian social arrangements (as does Marx). Although some commentators (e.g. Donahue, 2020) read Saramago’s apocalyptical catastrophes as allegorical of utopian renewal and transformation, this is despite the fact that Saramago was explicitly anti-utopian. Both writers employed writing strategies that anticipate, resemble or parody cybernetics (see Sousa, 2000, on Saramago; and on Perec and the work of Oulipo, James, 2009; Monk & Becker, 2018; Duncan, 2019; Terry, 2019). As is well known, Perec worked for more than 20 years as a research assistant to a scientific research group attached to the prestigious CNRS (whose focus on the neurophysiology and pharmacology of sleep would help inform his second novel A Man Asleep, Perec, 1967a). His principal duties were to index and keep up to date with current scientific literature and devise systems for their easy access and retrieval. He excelled at this, creating a new system widely regarded as anticipating computer versions. Ironically, this eventually would make this work redundant – as a significant personal reflection of DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-13

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wider socioeconomic shifts to a knowledge-based economy. This was fortunately at the same moment that Perec felt sufficiently confident about his writing career to take the financial risk to leave this job that had supported his writing for so long. At any rate, the clerical work suited his penchant for systems and rules, which also developed in his work with the anti-situationist radical group exploring experimental writing forms, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle/Workshop for Potential Literature (or OuLiPo, often written simply as Oulipo), as well as his additional job writing crosswords for daily newspapers which he maintained throughout his writing career. Commentaries on each writer have independently aligned them with Walter Benjamin, and with a Benjaminian philosophy of history (Benjamin, 1986) focused on interrupting received narratives by retrieving and attending to the political possibilities of subjugated perspectives that could have led to and perhaps may still – with differently composed joint actions – afford alternative outcomes (Salzani, 2018; Campos, 2018 on Saramago; Forsdick et al., 2019; Phillips, 2018 on Perec). This is notwithstanding considerable differences in explicit political engagement. One could perhaps say that Saramago was a bad old materialist and Perec more in tune with good new materialism. Yet you will see that such an opposition, one precisely produced by the ‘new materialist’ turn, breaks down under close reading of their work. Saramago was explicitly and actively politically engaged, as a member of the Portuguese Community Party, who ran as a candidate (albeit for positions with next to no likelihood of electoral success). Perec was too non-conformist to join any party but was instrumental in the Parisian avant-garde left in key unaligned but explicitly left journals and groups (including Oulipo) and actively joined anticolonial protests during the Algerian war (Bellos, 2010). These anticolonial commitments will feature in the texts considered here. But before we turn to these, some preliminary considerations for a Child as method analysis. Both Perec and Saramago have inspired considerable discussion of their philosophical as well as political positions (see Salzani & Vanhoutte, 2018; Zivin, 2012; Giannopoulou, 2014 on Saramago; Morley, 2015; Forsdick et al., 2019; Hall, 2020 on Perec). A Child as method, materialist reading of texts by these, as any other, authors should perhaps begin by acknowledging the likely role of these writers’ own understandings, or philosophies, of the conditions and circumstances of their childhoods as likely informing these texts. As David Bellos’ extensive biography traces in detail (Bellos, 2010), Perec spent a good deal with of his, sadly curtailed, life attempting to understand and come to terms with the traumatic events of his childhood. His novel W, or the memory of childhood (Perec, 1975/1988) published only seven years before his premature death, is an explicit meditation on the interpretive challenges of memory, including its unreliabilities and fabrications, alongside and interwoven with an allegorical cautionary tale of the dangers

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of fascism structured within the utopian project (Rubin, 2014). Given the good deal of time and effort Perec devoted to writing and rewriting his childhood memories, alongside also the desire to father children himself with his final partner, Catherine Binet, then, the relative absence of explicit references to children and childhood in the text I  will shortly discuss, Things, must surely be noteworthy. Repetition and citation, serious satire

Perec is a writer known for his maverick ingenuity, creativity and flexibility and his explorations of the limits of linguistic devices and expressions. His work explores the ambiguities of formal rules and constraints, and also what these enable. Bellos (2010) discusses Perec as needing such structures to galvanise and orient his writing, in his practice subverting the iconic humanist image of the creative genius whose talent cannot be measured, paradoxically gaining inspiration via systemic application of method. Rather than slavishly or mechanically following these rules, however, his later work especially allows for and even introduces some inconsistency or flexibility in their application. This is consistent with his irreverence for all systems, or rather investigation of the human and nonhuman forms of generativity produced by subtle variations in repetitive or iterative processes. Consider The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise (Perec, 2008/2011) mentioned earlier, or – even more clearly – his postcard project (which he dedicated to Italo Calvino) highlighting the banality and limited textual formulations people use in holiday postcards (see BonchOsmolovskaya, 2018), the 243 versions of which (see https://www.lyceelecor busier.eu/p5js/?p=3537, accessed August 9, 2023), in a commemoration of his life and work nearly 40  years after his death, were in 2022 turned into an actual postcard exhibition (Parr, 2022). The approach he used to generate the text for these postcards is indicative, deploying similar strategies to those which would be applied to the finest effect, perhaps, in his final vast work, La Vie mode d’emploi/Life: a user’s manual (1978/2003). It is described by the curators as follows: Perec made lists of countries & [sic] regions, towns and hotel names, using all the letters of the alphabet equally three times, dropping in literary and historical references, to give each message a location. He then also listed numerous activities, entertainments, thoughts and greetings before mathematically shuffling and combining them all. A typical message would take the form, We’re at the Pension des Glycines. Weather good. We eat well. I’ve got sunburnt. Back on the 17th. (https://uwe-repository.worktribe. com/output/7815557/postcards-for-perec) (accessed August 9, 2023)

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By such means, Perec not only critiqued commodified consumption and relationship practices but therefore exposed the conventionality and routinised forms of more-than-human connections between culture and nature. Perec excelled not only in the literary manipulation of repetition but also in literary reproduction and citation. This device has been interpreted as central to Perec’s epistemological frame, as oriented to undermining specific individual authority and notions of originality, and as indicating a philosophy that: ‘Modified acknowledged quotation is a surprising and simple defence against untruth’ (Bellos, 2010, p. 363). Perec’s long-time friend and collaborator, Harry Matthews, commented that there are two key striking features of Perec’s work: ‘its abundance and its dependence on exceptionally strict procedures . . . the strictness makes the abundance possible’ (1983, p. 143). He offers some other insights into what these constructed devices accomplished for Perec: Every writer who confronts a world without meaning and undertakes to transform it through language must answer the questions: Where do I begin? What right do I have to speak at all? Perec’s circumstances gave these questions special urgency. He was an orphan and a Jew for whom Jewishness meant not a community of language or tradition but ‘silence, doubt, instability, anxiety .  .  .  .’. Being Jewish meant ‘owing one’s life entirely to chance and exile’. Faced with such deprivation, Perec was forced to invent a place to start from: what he chose was the autonomy of complex structures, later subsumed in the Oulipian notion of constrictive form. (143) Mathews (1983) concludes from this: The choice [of constrictive forms] freed him from the agonizing problem of self-expression. (How can you express yourself when history has confiscated your voice?). Constrictive forms speak for themselves: they bring their own justification with them; there is no limit to what they can say. (143–4) Constraint, repetition, trauma

If, as cultural, transhuman artefacts, textual practices are more than human, connecting and transcending individual humans, they are surely also material, as well as engaged with by humans for the expression and working through of subjective-historical-geopolitical projects. Despite being known for his attention to space and detail – Perec’s geographical approach, or what

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he called the ‘infra-ordinary’ or ‘endotic’ (his neologism, as an antonym to the exotic), complements, rather than opposes, the attention to history and memory. Above all, I  consider Perec’s work as concerning subjectivity and its material construction and constraints, both explicitly and implicitly. Its implicit circumscription can be seen in works such as La Disparition (Perec, 1969/2008), written entirely without the use of the letter ‘e’ (and, impressively, also first published in English translation undertaken by Gilbert Adair in 1994 under the title A Void remarkably also achieving this feat). The experience of reading A Void (well, mine, anyway) is one of both being subjected to the convolutions and circumlocutions arrived at to avoid using this vowel, but also – both in its plot (which concerns the search for a missing person) and in its form which – although it does not explicitly announce its composition without the most common vowel in the French language – nevertheless evokes a sense of something awry, of circling around something that is not there. As is well known, Perec was very occupied in exploring the significance of absence – in particular, the meanings for him of his father having died fighting in the French army against the Nazi invasion of France at the early stages of World War II when Perec was very young, and – especially – his mother who was deported from Nazi-occupied Paris and murdered in Auschwitz. This was shortly after she had managed to put him on a train to join other relatives in the non-occupied French zone. Hence, in addition to losing both parents, and many relatives who were still in Eastern Europe as well as those who stayed in Paris, he also had a very near escape from Nazi extermination. Perec’s quasi-autobiographical discussion of childhood (fabricated) memories, W, is dedicated to ‘E’. In a remarkable cultural-material marking of substitutive trace, on the basis of accounts of his close relatives, Bellos (2010) suggests that this ‘E’ stands (in) for ‘eux’, the French term for ‘them’ which, when spoken also, sounds like the French pronunciation of the letter ‘e’. The particular ‘them’ that Perec was referring to in this dedication was his parents, of whom he recalled so little but whose absence exercised such a potent structuring force on his life and life circumstances. (Thus, it cannot be said that a Child as method reading, despite being non-humanist and non-childcentred, Burman, 2023, overlooks the historical or affective significance of embodied biographies, including those of adults who were once children.) Perec’s interest in ‘seeing flatly’ and attending to the every day, to the overlooked, most extensively elaborated in his collection Species of spaces and other pieces (Perec, 1999), are now being taken up as geographically sensitive sociological methodologies and fieldwork approaches in their own right (see Burman, 2015; Phillips, 2018; Forsdick et  al., 2019). Yet this interest was not at the expense of considerations of memory and history. Indeed, Perec is known to have undertaken three separate psychoanalyses, with no less

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significant practitioners and theorists than Françoise Dolto – whom he saw as a child, then with Michel de M’Uzan – a founding member and sometime director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Paris, and finally with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, who was a student of JP Sartre and then analysed by Lacan, and co-author (with Jean Laplanche) of The Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Laplanche  & Pontalis, 1967). Dolto (mentioned in Chapter  6) was (and remains) a key figure in French child psychoanalysis, and Bellos reports Dolto as having recognised not only Perec’s great personal loss but also his sense of being lost, cast adrift in space and lacking spatial reference points, which perhaps also accounts for his interest in islands, especially desert islands, as well as maps (as Crawley Jackson, 2019; Leak, 2019, also discuss). His 1966 book Un Homme Qui Dort/A Man Asleep, which is published alongside Things in the 1967 English edition, is a detailed exploration of the experience of depression, describing someone (considered by commentators to be based on personal experience) whose spatial and cognitive horizons reduce so much that his actions and bodily functions almost literally grind to halt, fixed and stuck. In an earlier account (Burman, 2020), I have discussed Perec’s (anti)autobiography, reflecting on its concerns with the failure, fabrication or avoidance of memory as much as its retrieval. W was perhaps Perec’s most workedupon text (it took him decades to write) and the one that, in his meticulously documented biography, Bellos (2010) suggests brought him the least satisfaction. It was completed before the end of his psychoanalysis with Pontalis, and (according to Bellos) was regarded by both him and his analyst as a defence against the analytic process, rather than its culmination. (Pontalis later published a barely disguised account of working with Perec, sometime after Perec had published a similar version of his own, Pontalis, 1975). Nevertheless, W is certainly informed by a psychoanalytically attuned understanding. Even though Perec perhaps can be seen as an iconic mid-twentieth-century European subject, as a man marked by trauma and loss from the Holocaust, he also was a struggling writer who failed to follow any conventional academic or career pathway. Bellos emphasises Perec’s economic as well as emotional precarity, generated in part by his orphan status (although he was brought up and financially supported by close relatives), as well as how his refusal to comply with conventional structures of academic accreditation and institutionalisation (despite obvious intellectual abilities) disadvantaged his progress as a recognised writer. Nevertheless, his relatively lowly (and low paid, as well as parodied in The art of asking your boss for a raise) (Perec, 2008/2011) position of clerk that he sustained for around 20 years both attuned him to scientific methods, developments and practices (some of which he gleefully parodied and subverted) and also informed his writing (as already mentioned, especially evident in the discussions around insomnia and sleep processes in Un Homme Qui Dort/A Man Asleep).

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In these multiple senses, therefore, Perec was deeply attentive to material conditions and contexts, both in the sense of socioeconomic processes, the formation of modes of subjectivity, the role of material culture – including advertising – in shaping this, and also mathematics and new technologies, while his writerly focus on affective spatialities reflexively extends and interrogates, as well as decentres, discussions of subjectivity as produced, mediated and moderated by context. Despite never completing any degree (he started several), he nevertheless regularly attended lectures by key philosophical figures teaching in Paris universities, including Roland Barthes (whose lectures on rhetoric he lampooned in his short tragic-farcical tale Quel petit vélo . . .? (to be discussed shortly) even by appending it with an alphabetical list of all the rhetorical devices he had used). (Incidentally, Perec sent Barthes his first completed version of Les Choses, and Barthes’ prompt and enthusiastic response – insisting that it should be published – was a major boost for the, up to that point, as yet unpublished writer.) Child as method, Perec, and (anti)colonialism

This is the moment to address some geopolitical considerations. As a postcolonial-informed approach, Child as method topicalises the global in the local, as well as seeking to decentre or destabilise coloniality. Perec’s biography not only traverses war, occupation and genocide in Europe, but living in Paris in the 1950s, he was at the centre of a major historical and current colonial power, even as Paris was also a key hub for anticolonial debate. Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour?/Which moped with chrome-plated bars at the back of the yard?, Perec’s little discussed (and badly received) second book (published in 1966), takes its title from the fact that the main character, Pollak (whose Jewish-Polish-origin name aligns with Perec’s own origins), drives on his moped between the barracks at Vincennes and his native Montparnasse twice a day. Perhaps the (literal) question posed by the title interrogates the allegiance and commitment of this minor officer. As Balkoski (2020) comments: ‘Just as he [Pollak] shuttles between the military and the civilian population, he is at once French and not French. He supervises young conscripts who will be sent off to fight a war he can avoid’ (88). The war at issue is the Algerian War of Independence, the war that Fanon (1959/1965) writes about from inside the Algerian context, and that is generally considered to be an overlooked topic in French literature and historiography, symptomatic of a national desire to erase or forget French colonial violence and brutality (Ellena, 2001; Lazreg, 2022). Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour? (Perec, 2008/2011) is based on a true incident, encountered during Perec’s time doing military service when he elected (rather improbably – he was not a physically fit man) to join the parachute regiment. He managed – just about – to complete the basic

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training, but then saw out most of his 27 months of service in administrative roles not far from Paris, rather than enduring active deployment. As Bellos notes, while Perec could avoid deployment to the front (which would have involved suppressing the Algerian insurgency – a project he would never have supported), he was not allowed full exemption from military service because of the complexities of his precarious relationship with French nationality. Although both of his parents had been killed during the Second World War, his father fighting for France, he was nevertheless unable to claim that his Jewish mother had died ‘pour la France’, even though she had been murdered in Auschwitz because of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime. During this mandatory but slightly circumscribed military service, then, a new recruit approached Perec whose antipathy to serving in Algeria reflected his own commitments. This young man asked Perec and his fellow soldiers to inflict an injury on him so that he could be excused or delayed from deployment on disability grounds. Bellos describes accounts of Perec bringing this problem to his Paris friends and how their efforts to comply with his request go dramatically awry – having wined and dined the young man to dull the pain of injury, the man instead collapsed, and so they were unable to proceed with the plan. On awakening, the young man rejoined his regiment. Quel petit vélo . . .? is Perec’s self-parody of this escapade. While Balkoski’s (2020) consideration of this story addresses the political complexities and landscapes of French Jewish identities as they engage various forms of coloniality, the story is also discussed by Davidson (1998) as among a small but significant corpus of literature countering official French historians’ claims that there is no memory of the Algerian war in France. Davidson reviews this as one of very few contemporary texts that not only explores the futility of the Algerian war but also highlights and indirectly documents the soldiers’ own cynicism as about the colonial project they were being sent to bolster: In a deeply ironic critique of the military’s discourse about the army and the Algerian war, Perec, with a manic gift for untranslatable word-play, tells the story of Karatruc (literally, Kara-thing; Perec continually changes the second half of his character’s name) and his attempts to evade being sent to Algeria. . . . Although the ‘dirty war’ is described as belonging to the Algerians, the young men in this book see an Algerian victory as inevitable and do not subscribe to the military’s doctrine that ‘la France et Dieu comptaient sur eux . . . et qu’ils tenaient bien haut le flambeau sacré de la civilisation occidentale en peril (jaune’) (Perec 35). (76) To translate that final sentence, Perec writes: ‘France and God counted on them and that they held high the sacred torch of western civilisation in peril

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(yellow)’ (with the ‘yellow’ here a quip or parody of the forms of racism underlying the civilisational project). Indeed, the text is stuffed full of searing political critique and self-criticism (of the comfortable, complacent, French intellectual Left in which Perec himself enthusiastically participated). Indeed, Perec dedicates the book ‘to the memory of L.G.’s finest feat of arms (and I’m not kidding you)’. L.G. was ‘La Ligne Général’, the short-lived or perhaps only (over-) planned journal Perec and his non-aligned comrades envisaged to ‘. . .reinvigorate Marxist approaches to culture, whilst remaining outside of the control of the Communist Party, then a dominating influence in French intellectual and cultural life’ (Bellos, 2004, p.  6). The critique ranges from poking fun at the petty rituals and pointless hierarchies of the army, to ‘the chums’ (as Perec designates Pollak’s metropolitan clique) classed romanticisation of the desperate new recruit and his worthy project of resistance. This then turns to resigned disdain as they discover that he does not seem either as clever or as politically motivated as they had thought. It turns out that both Pollak and Kata(thing) really just want to spend the war in bed with their ladyloves and they also know that some agreement is on the horizon that will happen irrespective of their military engagement. (The failure to maintain a constant rendering of the new recruit’s name is one of the key, significant, jokes of the novel – significant as an indicator of the lack of real engagement on the part of the ‘chums’ with the new conscript, whose only interest is really as the object of their missionary zeal to help him out of his predicament.) Indeed, in his Introduction, Bellos (2004, pp. 5–6) notes, Which Moped . . .? is not just a high-spirited exercise in literary aggression. . . . The underlying issue of the literary entertainment is not comical at all, but had been a vitally serious one for the generation of French people who came into adulthood in the course of the unpopular and unwinnable Algerian war: whether or not to implement their principled belief in passive resistance, and to put themselves beyond the law. With its swirling, circling style of telling, retelling and so importing more selfcritical comments via these variations, Perec reserves his most scathing formulations for the military project of suppressing the independence struggle in Algeria, as well as lampooning the racism that is supported by this, alongside sending up the incompetence of the overintellectual clique of would-be saboteurs. The comments about the army start with a fairly nationalist formulation where the commanding officer has ‘the wearisome task of drawing up a list of those who will go . . . to water with their blood those noble African hills which our glorious history has made into French territories’ (12). But Kara(truc) demands: ‘Break my foot so that never more may it be used for murtricidal ends . . . . The Algerians’ll slip us a Mickey. And peace might

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even be being signed as we speak’ (13). All he wants to do is ‘to sleep sweetly between the girl he was crazy about’s arms, instead of going off cavorting in the jebels’ (15); that is, ‘wanting to bail out of Algeria by getting footcapped and then sleeping sweetly between the girls he was crazy about’s arms while peace will be signed’ (16). (The grammatical errors, repetitions and disfluencies are part of the novel’s joke.) Indeed, a faked injury would mean ‘they’d be off his back for a good while and that the Algerians will probably thrash our sides and that peace has been signed’ (17–18) and ‘he’d be off the hook for a good long while and that the French have been driven back into the sea, women and children first, the widows sent back to the dowars they came from and the armistice is on the way and peace has been signed’ (18). Another formulation of what would lie ahead is indicated as ‘while the rebels will have gobbled us up raw, negotiations got under way and peace has been signed’ (19), while the soldiers wearing their army gear are ‘wobbling under the weight of Arabicidal paraphernalia’ (20). As indicated, the reluctant conscript has other matters on his mind and wishes that ‘clouds of Algeria had never darkened the pure sun of his love’ (21), while the army command ‘printed out the names of those who would soon be off to play soldiers’ (21). Further, the narrator’s understanding of what deployment involves becomes increasingly unreliable, betraying both lack of attention and also lack of commitment to understanding: ‘Karathingy, who refuses to go to the Mediterainean (I’m not quite sure about that spelling) the climatic conditions being what they are’ (23). Still, the soldiers are being packed off there: ‘So the Algeroclasts gathered up their gear, stacked up their kits, patched up their togs, stitched up their socks, polished up their boots, greased down their guns, drew their rations of Knorr stock-cubes, coffee powder, quinine salts, vermifugal powder . . .’ (24), and irrespective of rank they share an at best hazy idea of what they are being sent there for: It emerged firstly Karasplotch was a dolt and that they were all the same . . . he, Colonel Dimbeau, child of arms, son of the regiment, would rather be off to have a bash at Sidi-Belle-Abbesses any day. (24) (In addition to being a significant Algerian city, Sidi bel abbes, or SidiBel-Abbès, was where the French foreign legion had its main base until 1962.) At any rate, this hotchpotch of misinformation, misplaced labour and whipping up of racist and nationalist sentiment is shown to be additionally pointless as the war is about to be settled: ‘maybe the Algerians would finally win their bloody war and that the cease-fire will come into force and that peace has been signed’ (36); ‘eleven handpicked psycolonels . . . would pack him off into storage while the brave moujahidin turn the tables on us and a

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truce is due any day now and peace has been signed’ (39). Aside from wanting to stay in bed with his lover, ‘he wasn’t particularly sold on the idea of going off fine-toothcombing the jebels’ (42), but in the end, the ‘great Karathrustra’ (45) is spotted ‘bent double under his arabicidal burden’s paraphernalia, or rather paraphernalia’s burden’ (45) and ‘trains full of Algeroclasts left’ (47). For the metropolitan intellectual elite, Pollak’s ‘chums’, the war is figured as both physically and politically unsettling, but little more than that: From their comfortable Parisian café, they reflect: “We thought about the war, over there, in the hot sun: the sand, the stones and the ruins, the cold awakenings under canvas, the forced marches, battles of ten against one, war, in fact. War ain’t no picnic, indeed it ain’t. In truth we felt like crying (I think I’ve already said that)”. (47) The description of the conscripts shifts from ‘watering with their blood’ those ‘noble African hills’ to become ‘murticidal’, ‘Arabicidal’ and ‘Algeroclasts’ sent to ‘play soldiers’, ‘cavorting in the jebels’ and even ‘going off fine-toothcombing the jebels’. The Algerian fighters are ‘Algerians [who] will probably thrash our sides’, ‘rebels [who] will have gobbled us up raw’, ‘brave moujahidin [who] turn the tables and reverse the colonial project’ such that ‘the French have been driven back into the sea, women and children first, the widows sent back to the dowars they came from’. (Note the double-gendered reference here to the bereaved survivors of war.) Yet amid and notwithstanding all the verbal, narrative and plot buffoonery, the peace agreement – that is understood to be both imminent and inevitable – is also presented as just. Perec’s contemporary rendering of a subaltern French view of the Algerian liberation struggle, crafted from his dual positions as both in the armed forces and part of the cultured, liberal-left Parisian youth (that he ‘phut-phut-phuts’ between on his moped . . .) – can be read fruitfully alongside Fanon’s anticolonial accounts. It helps flesh out the claims made – especially in the co-authored sections of A Dying Colonialism (Fanon, 1959/1965) – of the dawning and growing support for the Algerian liberation movements from the metropolitan French left that would, eventually, help turn the tide of French public opinion and end French rule in Algeria. Perec on Things (Les Choses) (1967/1965)

Out of Perec’s fascinating corpus, for the purposes of my concerns in this chapter I  will focus on Les Choses/Things (Perec, 1967b) (hereafter I  will refer to the English-translated text), as a literary arena in which to explore modes of and approaches to materialism. As already indicated, Things was

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Perec’s first published novel and won him the Prix Renaudot (although in fact it was his fourth full book manuscript, and Bellos highlights how even this went through five major rewrites). It started life as a swindle/heist story, a major theme of all of Perec’s writings. This preoccupation can be aligned with Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts to children (Benjamin, 2021), which use this theme to expose the sham of capitalism and commodity accumulation (see my discussion in Burman, 2020, and also Caselli, 2016). However, in the final published text, this aspect only appears in reduced form as a couple of paragraphs (with Jérôme and Sylvie and their friends imagining how they might rob a bank to get the money they want to fund their lifestyle, cf. 85–8). This book also indicates various other characteristic aspects of Perec’s writing – including contrasting and alternating narrative structures, the inclusion of an epilogue, and the presentation of lists of items. Many of the lists in Things correspond to the forms of clothing, style and food that Perec and his friends longed for or worked to purchase. (Bellos suggests that Perec, like Jérôme and Sylvie, appreciated what were then identified as English styles of fashion in shoes and shirts and furnishings.) The book was indeed closely modelled on Perec’s own life and friends. (In a rather cruel characterisation of their orientation, he writes: ‘Like anyone else, they could have made it; but all they wanted was to have it made. That is probably the sense in which they were what are commonly called intellectuals’ (65)). But it is also more than this. Matthews, his close friend and fellow Oulipolian, claims it is futile to try to distinguish between the autobiographical and the fictional in Perec’s writing (Mathews, 1983), while Bellos (2010) characterises Things as the ‘atextual inscription of the discourse of a particular group’ (314). In terms of its reception, unsurprising given its density and difficulty, Things was not an instant success but acclaim gradually gathered momentum, albeit being interpreted in different ways. It was often understood as a critique of capitalist consumption and so was widely translated and taken up in Soviet Bloc countries. Bellos notes that the title also refers to Sartre’s ‘outrageously inauthentic childhood autobiography. . . . To which Things seems like a pointed rejoinder’ (284). The book is stuffed full of allusions and imitations, if not downright borrowings, of phrases from other authors – especially Flaubert. Indeed, Bellos suggests that even the final quotation from Marx probably comes from Eisenstein, albeit that, bowdlerised or not, ‘the motto is nonetheless one to which Perec remained ever faithful’ (306). The main characters in Les Choses, Jérôme and Sylvie, appear less as dupes of capitalist consumer society than expressions of the existential dilemma of human existence, an interpretation made by Matthews, which I share (see Mathews, 1983). There are detailed descriptions of Parisian life, interior design, fashion and clothing, lavish meals and evenings drinking in bars. Other aspects of the book also reflected aspects of Perec’s own life (since

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he too had worked as a market researcher, lived for some months in Tunisia as the accompanying spouse of his wife, Paulette, who – like Sylvie – took up a post teaching English in Sfax, which is where the (briefer) second part of the novella is set). The protagonists Jérôme and Sylvie are, similarly, for a time politically engaged in anticolonial protests (around the Algerian war) – although it should be noted that Perec’s involvement was more deeply felt and sustained than that attributed to Jérôme and Sylvie. Perec mercilessly unpicks the self-serving motivations underlying their political participation: It didn’t add up to much. . . . They wished something would happen to prove what they were doing was important, necessary, irreplaceable, that their fear-struck efforts would be something they needed, something that might help them to know themselves, or change themselves, to live. . . . Their local Anti-Fascist Committee held one more meeting and agreed to step up its activity. But, as the holiday season was nearly upon them, there didn’t really seem to be any reason for them even to remain vigilant. (Perec, 75) The book traces Jérôme and Sylvie’s transition from carefree young adults living it up in Paris, engaging in work primarily to fund their high consumer lifestyle, to eventually becoming less enamoured of this way of life, where the things no longer appeal so much. By the end of the novella, they are about to do (since the last chapter is in the future tense) precisely what they had previously designated an unacceptable compromise or capitulation to conventionality by taking a secure job in the provinces: Half critical, half sympathetic, Things ends with a prospect that is both firmly optimistic (for Jérôme and Sylvie will now have the means to acquire the things they want) and infinitely sad (for the feast that awaits them in adulthood promises to be quite simply tasteless). (Bellos, 2010, p. 300) A key feature noted by commentators is the ‘avoidance of psychologising omniscience’ (Bellos, 2010, p. 293). Instead: The unprecedented wattage of the light that Perec throws onto the things Jérôme and Sylvie desire leave their world without a core. They have no passion that they can espouse with a clear heart. .  .  . they are caught between their passion for higher standards of living, and their awareness that that is no passion at all. Their emotional lives hang on an unresolved contradiction. Either they are attached to an unworthy ideal, or they are simply youngsters without much inside them. (Bellos, 315)

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Either way, even as the things Jérôme and Sylvie want are ultimately meaningless, so too are they themselves emptied of significance by this preoccupation. But what a preoccupation it is! The text swirls and circles around the sensuous pleasures of fabrics and fine foods and display. It opens up questions about what the good life might be in conditions of – if not plenty – then of opportunity, emulation, acquisition and (struggling for the possibility of) having it all now. Bellos finally glosses the book as follows: What Perec does in his novel is to put a hook into what many young people fear most about themselves, which is that they lack substance. Things does not speak directly of depression; but it creates by design an emotion of bewildered guilt, a bottomless melancholy that is both Perec’s and the reader’s. The emotions that Perec does not mention leave gaps in the text so carefully shaped that the reader can hardly avoid filling them in. (Bellos, 2010, p. 315) Matter

Materials and materialisms therefore arise in various ways in this book, as matter (which we all are, living and non-living, human and more-thanhuman), and in our more abstract, apparently unmaterial but in fact very materially-organised uses of, relationships with, and desires for, things – things as stuff, as objects to be owned, consumed, accumulated; commodities, yes, but also as signifiers of class and gender status and class mobility. This is no political economic analysis of production, however, but rather a detailed account of the forms of subjectivity – of subjectification – organised and produced by the post-World War II boom in consumer ‘goods’, and the engagement of those who work to analyse this (see also Smith, 2019). Indeed, Perec’s work in some ways anticipates, in literary form, what Bourdieu would do in his 1979 (translated into English in 1984) text, Distinction. It does, however, also perhaps exemplify the particular turning point in late capitalism from industrial production to what, as we have seen, Lazzarato (1996) termed immaterial labour, since the work that Jérôme and Sylvie, like their friends, do to fund their lifestyle involves communication, being approachable and friendly and non-threatening, in order to solicit information about perceptions and rankings of objects and brands to inform better marketing and promote more consumption. Indeed, Jérôme and Sylvie’s own tastes or styles, depicted in such vivid, gorgeous detail, are precisely a reflection of their own efforts to distinguish themselves from the more conventional, petit bourgeois, lower class ‘types’ of people whose lives they document, research and disparage. It might be said that all the people in Things have been objectified, even as the things themselves, the objects, goods, consumer items, have become animated by human desires and attributes.

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In terms of literary style, as various commentators have noted, distinctive tense forms characterise the text. The first chapter is entirely cast in the conditional, the modality of possibility, aspiration and desire. Bellos (2001) characterises this as both a mobilisation and a subversion of grammatical form: the exclusive use of the conditional mood in the first pages of Les Choses not only de-realizes the room being described, it modifies somewhat the modal value of the conditional itself, which, from being a tense implying a hypothetical state of affairs, becomes charged with the sense of idle dreaming. (296) The last chapter uses the future tense. Hence, the middle section of the book is literally bookended by ‘two “unreal” times zones’ as Mathews (1983, p. 139) puts it. This, the main text, is concerned with what happens, cast in the past definite and imperfect: Because the grammatical structure corresponds to the situation in which Jérôme and Sylvie find themselves, it transforms a detached, apparently cold story into a touching personal drama. Perec says of his two characters “Nothing human was unknown to them”. Jérôme and Sylvie are incarnations of a basic human dilemma (of which consumer society is merely a particular context): they desire a world they cannot accept because it has been imposed on them. (Matthews, 139) Yet what has happened between the beginning and the end of the story is actually somewhat unclear, enigmatic. There is no great hiatus, or climax, to account for the shift. Rather there is a sense of having exhausted all other eventualities. As already mentioned, Les Choses ends with the quotation attributed to Marx: ‘The means is as much part of the truth as the result. The quest for truth must itself be true, the true quest is the unfurling of a truth whose different parts combine in the result’. Les Choses can therefore be read as an enactment of the quest for truth, with a (lexical and grammatical) focus on process. Rather than specifying a definitive outcome, it is the reader who must invest subjectively in the text to draw out what it could mean. The English edition of Les Choses is followed by Un Homme Qui Dort, whose resolution is ‘neither a triumph nor a rebirth, only the acceptance of his existence among others – a moment at once flat, poignant and serene’ (Mathews, 1983, p. 139). Bellos concludes his evaluation: It is not entirely fair to say that Perec hedges his bets at the end of either novel – he was genuinely neither for nor against consumer society, just as

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he was neither for nor against depression, indifference and gloom – but in both cases he declines to take his story to a strictly narrative conclusion. (Bellos, 2010, p. 360) What emerges from Les Choses, therefore, is how the ‘thingly’ status of the material goods is, therefore, as much in question as the material fabrication of the protagonists’ subjectivities, as well as the reader’s identificatory and evaluation processes. Having situated Perec and his writing more generally, I now move on to connect more directly with Child as method. Les Choses in relation to Child as method

The flatness and lack of overt interiority or subjectivity of Les Choses does not make it easy to interpret. Reading the text, the initial impression is of a striking lack of personal history, even of individuality. The protagonists remain an undifferentiated ‘they’ until the start of Chapter III, where they are eventually named as Jérôme and Sylvie, and given ages (Jérôme is 24 and Sylvie 22 – a conventionally gendered age relation for a young heterosexual couple). Bellos notes how Jérôme and Sylvie lack surnames, and this offers some clues for a Child as method perspective, for the withholding of generational or lineage marking here surely communicates something to do with disconnection from tradition; a new generation unfettered, perhaps, and so able to strike out in new ways. Still, the lack of specific geographical and familial markers contributes to a sense of thin characterisation. This sense is amplified by the way the narrative trajectory largely deals with Jérôme and Sylvie as a single unit (to be supplemented or contrasted with other couples and groups they join for their outings, parties and dinners, and in whose houses and apartments they eat, drink, play cards and foment desires for more things). The focus is on their actions, and the reader’s only access to their interiority is in terms of their escalating desires for things to own, to display, to consume and also to do. Subjectivity is objectified and invested in things and actions. A rare reference to their own personal histories appears to emphasise not only the severing of familial links but Jérôme and Sylvie’s status as a social category, or type: ‘Their memories of childhood were all similar, just as the paths they had followed, their slow departures from their family backgrounds, and the vistas they thought they had chosen for themselves, were identical’ (51). Gender is perhaps the main differentiation that is topicalised, as generated, constructed, amplified and displayed in forms of clothing, shoes, shirts and accessories. Access to these ‘goods’ requires money, and Jérôme and Sylvie are not from rich backgrounds. The claim on generation appears, therefore, only in terms of the protagonists’ thwarted access to inherited wealth: ‘They cast their eyes enviously, desperately, towards the visible comfort, luxury and

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perfection of the upper middle classes. They had no past, no tradition. There were no inheritances to wait for’ (50). A key feature that stands out is how the plot, with the focus on Jérôme and Sylvie and their friends, enacts a particular subjective engagement and resistance to a normative developmental trajectory – of ‘growing up’, getting a regular job, settling down; an avoidance of provincial ‘steady’ life that appears to characterise metropolitan youth of the 1960s. The usual lifestage and lifecourse categories of social and individual development are barely mentioned, except to be warded off, and it seems that Jérôme and Sylvie and their group are determined to live a different kind of life. Marriage scarcely figures and there is almost no mention of children (I will turn to this point shortly). Equally, beyond the extracts discussed earlier there is no mention of childhoods, whether Jérôme and Sylvie’s own childhoods or anyone else’s. Rather the story appears to concern their efforts to sustain an irregular, countercultural, hedonistic life and lifestyle, including the struggle to do this (especially as they do not have the financial resources to sustain this). The freedom from conventional responsibilities is initially figured as a form of oedipal triumph, of superiority over their predecessors, of a new class-structured, generationally available form of power; ‘These were their great days of conquest. They had nothing; they were discovering the riches of the world’ (39). Some pages later, however, this way of life has palled: ‘Their lives were not conquests, but slow collapses, dispersions’ (78). Existential dilemmas and normative expectations associated with age and career development preoccupy them. A refrain returned to throughout Part II of the novel concerns age-associated grades and presumed trajectories. This highlights Jérôme and Sylvie’s self-understanding of the limited marketability as well as desirability of their own flexible labour, as members of what is now called the precariat: For if it is commonly accepted that people who have not yet reached thirty may remain relatively independent and work as and when it suits them, even if their availability, openness of mind, the variety of their experience and what is still called their adaptability is sometimes valued, it is on the other hand required, paradoxically of any partner, once he has passed the milestone of this thirtieth birthday (and this is, precisely, what makes your thirtieth birthday a milestone) that he show some evidence of stability, discipline, judicious behaviour. (60) This sense of age-graded milestones, constellated around the age of 30, is presented as commonly accepted truth (emphasised by the interpellation of the reader as ‘your’), and as a challenge or condition shared by an entire

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generational cohort (with an interesting ambiguity between sexual and business partner). This shifts from being configured in terms of employment conditions, that ‘employers, especially in advertising, not only decline to take on people over the age of 35, they are reluctant to rely on someone who, at the age of 30, has never been on the staff’ (60–1, emphasis original), to becoming internalised as both an existential anxiety and a moral imperative: ‘you owe it to yourself to have got somewhere, or else you are nowhere. And no-one is anywhere unless he has found his niche, built his nest, got his own keys, his own desk, his own little name-plate’ (61). Getting somewhere, then, is literalised, in terms of place, and ownership of the place, even if miniaturised into a ‘name-plate’. It is also presented as a general ‘predicament’: ‘They were right in the middle of the most idiotic, the most ordinary predicament in the world’ (63). This pressure to ‘make it’ is presented as almost inexorable: ‘One after another almost all their friends gave in. The age of rootless living gave way to the age of security. . . .Jérôme and Sylvie ended up almost alone’. (79). By the end of the novel, Jérôme and Sylvie seem to be reconciled reluctantly to being like others, to ageing and surrendering the youthful life of all-out enjoyment and the drive for an ever-higher standard of living in favour of accessing the more secure life, being more sensible, responsible. This – perhaps – includes a vista of reproductive futurism of the kind critiqued by queer theorists (Edelman, 2004), that is here prefigured in parodied form by the reported conversations of Jérôme and Sylvie’s market research, which includes the investment in and deferment of gratification for one’s children. It would be easy to conclude that Jérôme and Sylvie have become like the marketing types they researched: their labour has consumed them and produced them as fodder for late capitalism. Indeed, Perec suggests as much: The enemy was unseen. Or, rather, the enemy was within them, it had rotted them, infected them, eaten them away. They were the hollow men, the turkey round the stuffing. Tame pets, faithfully reflecting a world which taunted them. They were up to their necks in a cream cake from which they would only ever be able to nibble crumbs. (78) But despite the critique indicated by both plot and narrative form, Jérôme and Sylvie are not unsympathetic characters, and the book condemns neither them nor their desires; rather, those desires are shown to be exhausted, in the end not only unfulfillable but also unfulfilling. Still, life without them is presented as scarcely preferable. What effects this central shift in orientation that marks so dramatic a change? Addressing this requires a postcolonial detour, or rather tour.

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Metamorphosis through exile

Part I of Things ends with Jérôme and Sylvie glimpsing the emptiness of their pleasure-filled and pleasure-seeking lives: They thought it was happiness they were investing in their dreams. They thought their imagination was unshackled, splendid and, with each successive wave, permeated the whole world. They thought that all that they had to do was to walk for their stride to be a felicity. But what they were, when they came down to it, was alone, stationary, and a bit hollow. (94) This dawning awareness crystallises into some kind of crisis when their ‘motivation research’ survey work takes them into the French countryside. There they experience an encounter with landed wealth, or at any rate with the riches of enduring land cultivation and habitation, the security and fecundity and seduction of old money naturalised into the landscape. This brings home to Jérôme and Sylvie their own insignificance: ‘They were a tiny blot of poverty on the great sea of plenty. They looked around at the great yellow fields with their little red splashes of poppies. And they felt crushed’ (95). This precipitates the decision to do something different. The subjective transformation that takes place for Jérôme and Sylvie in Things hinges around the eight-month stay in Sfax, Tunisia (the city in which, as already noted, Perec also spent time accompanying his wife, Paulette). What Perec depicts is how this visit, prompted by the need to find ways to make more money, or rather to resource Jérôme and Sylvie’s consuming passions, in fact comes to undo these. This ‘queerest eight months of their lives’ (105) marks what feels initially to be a welcome break from their previous life: ‘Their life had been only a kind of endless tightrope walk leading nowhere: empty appetite, naked desire without bounds or props. They felt exhausted. They had left to go to ground, to forget, to wind down’. (102). But, once there, their sense is that being there ‘was more like running away’ (105), while their lives in Sfax seem stagnant, repetitious, empty, even wasted: ‘Their lives were dripping away’ (109), It soon occurred to them that they were going to stop living altogether. Time passed and stood still. . . .They had always lived in Sfax, they would always live there. They had lost all their plans, all their impatience. They looked forward to nothing. (112) Separated from the site of escalating consumption and from the friends and scenes that incite this, they are derailed from the project that had organised and galvanised their young adult lives. In part, this winding down, or sense of

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stagnation, seems to arise from the isolation they experience as much as the disconnection from the initial drive to consume: ‘Sometimes they would go an entire week without speaking to anyone’ (112). The city appears to them empty, devoid of people and relationships. Importantly, it seems that if it is indifference or tolerance that they experience as emanating from the native population in this early postcolonial moment (Tunisia gained independence from France in 1956), yet there is hostility from the other French people living there. For even the job does not afford connections or relationships, as Sylvie is the wrong kind of expat: She should have been a teacher’s wife as well as a career teacher herself, and a regular small-town, middle-class housewife, and have some dignity, deportment, culture. Not let the old country down, don’t you know. And though there were in a sense two classes of expatriates – teachers at the start of their careers, eager to grab a suburban semi as fast as they could in Angoulême, Béziers or Tarbes, and the cohort of conscientious objectors or disciplinary cases who did not get the colonial service bonus in their pay but could afford to despise the first group (but the latter were a dying breed). (111) So, as putative ex-colonials in Sfax, Jérôme and Sylvie come up against the very conventional gendered and generational (and implicitly racialised) norms and assumptions about social mobility that their Parisian high-life had been about avoiding – encountered in this (post)colonial context in particularly acute and alienating ways. No surprise, then, that they cannot fit in, especially in failing to adhere to the implicit rule of not mixing with the indigenous population: ‘Neither class were prepared, apparently, to concede that you could sit in the cinema in the front row, next to native ragamuffins, or saunter unshaven, unbuttoned in the street, in clogs like a ne’re-do-well’. (112) Even these moments of shared space are only minor indications of coexistence, rather than relationship. It seems significant that the metamorphosis does not come about from a substantive connection with the lived realities of colonialism or with the formerly colonised, indigenous Tunisians. Rather, as ever, Jérôme and Sylvie find a way to get along, without real engagement, as misfits within both local and colon arenas. Hence even if, or though, their transformation occurs in Sfax, in a French (former but very recent) colony, this is no orientalist realisation precipitated by the encounter with the other, or another; rather, it is the enforced encounter with the emptiness of themselves and the fact that, once away from the contexts that had constellated the meanings of their lives, they were nothing: all they saw remained foreign, belonged to another world, did not concern them. And from these trips they brought back only images of emptiness

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and drought: desolate heaths, tundra, sea inlets, a mineral world where nothing grows; their own world of loneliness, their own dry desert. (116–7) Perec makes it clear that the ‘no man’s land’ or ‘vacuum’ that Jérôme and Sylvie experience is of their own making, in the sense that they choose not to engage with or try to understand the context they are living in: ‘They were in the centre of a vacuum, they had settled into a no man’s land of parallel streets, yellow sand, inlets and dusty palm trees, a world they did not understand, that they did not seek to understand’ (112). There is an important differentiation between authorial position and depiction of character here, for this is about Jérôme and Sylvie, not Tunisia, and it would seem that Perec wants the reader to know this. Nevertheless, we might speculate about the plot significance of this postcolonial sojourn that acquires almost biblical narrative significance in marking a period of transition and transformation, a wandering in the desert, and an experience of exile (cf. 118). Jérôme and Sylvie, having separated themselves from their familiar, native, context are separated also from those things that they had invested with such meaning, and so arrive at a place of greater humility and lesser needs around material artefacts: In such a vacuum, precisely because of this vacuum, because of the absence of all things, because of such a fundamental vacuity, such a blank zone, a tabula rasa, they felt as if they were being cleansed, returning to a greater simplicity, to true modesty. (113, emphasis added) Tunisia, and specifically Sfax (the industrial heartland of the country), as the context for this encounter and subjective shift is important, for this is where Jérôme and Sylvie encounter poverty (and riches) as relative, rather than absolute qualities: ‘And in a place as poor as Tunisia, to tell the truth, their own financial straits, the petty poverty of civilised people accustomed to showers, cars and cold drinks, did not mean very much’ (113). Hence, when eventually Jérôme and Sylvie are invited to visit and encounter what would formerly have been their dream house, a colonial mansion (in fact one Perec also visited, in Hammamet) kitted out in all the ways they most admired and desired, the experience is already too late: That was certainly the Tunisia they would have found it easiest to settle in, cosmopolitan Tunisia with its remnants of prestige, pleasant climate and its colourful and picturesque life. That was the kind of life that they first dreamt of: but they had turned into Sfaxians, provincials, exiles. (118)

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From being metropolitan fashionistas, Jérôme and Sylvie have become disconnected from the impetus of their desire. ‘They no longer knew what they wanted. There were dispossessed’ (119). This dislocation even from what ‘cosmopolitan Tunisia’ could have offered them, as expats who could just about access that life, indicates how much they have let go of their former desires. It is therefore not so surprising that, having become ‘provincials’ in Tunisia, they move to the provinces in France. Yet, having repudiated other more conventional markers of futurity and progress, the question remains of what Jérôme and Sylvie have without their passion to consume and acquire: ‘before, they had had at least a passion for possessing. Often it was wanting that had been all their existence. They had felt drawn towards the future, impatient, consumed with desire’ (119). Now that impetus towards the future has waned, been derailed, ‘[s]omething resembling a quiet and very gentle tragedy was entering the heart of their decelerating lives’ (119). What had animated, accelerated their previous existence no longer inspired or fulfilled them. Part II finishes with the words: There was nothing left. They were at the finishing line, at the terminus of the doubtful trajectory which had been their life for six years, at the end of that uncertain quest which had taken them nowhere, which had taught them nothing. (119) What follows is the Epilogue (narrated in the future tense) describing their return to mainland France, their attempts to resume their old life in Paris but feeling cramped and suffocated, and eventually ‘after a few years of errant living, weary of not enough money, weary of counting the pennies and of resenting the counting’ (124) their taking executive posts in an advertising company in Bordeaux. Perec makes it clear that they are only minor business-people: The only millions they will manipulate will belong to other people. They will get some of the crumbs, for appearances, for silk shirts, for pigskin gloves. They will be presentable. They will be well housed, well fed, well dressed. They will not be wanting. (124–5) There they will have the things they want, the ‘chesterfield settee, their armchairs in soft natural leather as stylish as seats in Italian racing cars, their rustic tables, their lecterns, and their fitted carpets, silk rugs and light oak bookcases’ (124), and more. But even as they embark on this new life of comfort, and comforts, the novel ends indicating that their celebratory first meal ‘will be quite simply tasteless . . .’ (126, end ellipsis in original).

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The narrative of Things spans six years in the lives of Jérôme and Sylvie and their circle, notably from their early to mid-twenties, to just before becoming 30, that threshold of no return in relation to the social imperatives they so intensely feel, to find a secure position and ‘settle down’. It is the ‘detour’ via Sfax, the eight months in Tunisia, that effects the ‘metamorphosis’ (42) from cultural rebels escaping the conventional, developmentally heteronormative White social mobility trajectory of a steady job, marriage and children to then take up the positions of ordinary (provincial) citizens who will, presumably, now do all those things. Significantly, on the train to Bordeaux, along with all the factories and other ‘modern’ developments they see from the window, there is a first indication of the trope of the child as a futuristic icon, and moreover with a racialised hue: ‘Children will be running along a white road’ (126), the ‘white road’ of Eurocentric development, the White time (Mills, 2014) of racial capitalism. Through exploring the existential dilemmas faced by Jérôme and Sylvie the question remains open as to whether there is any alternative to this normative trajectory. They are creatures of context, material subjects produced from the conditions they inhabit and their effortful struggle to make sense of these. Perec leaves open the question of whether Jérôme and Sylvie’s capitulation to conventional age, class, racialised and heterosexed gender positionings was inevitable, or rather was because they had so little else to care about, or to direct their lives. Back to Child as method

For the more empirically minded, the questions structuring this materialistoriented reading of Things can be summarised as follows: • What models of human and more-than-human relations are at play? • What do things do in Things? What material political and affective economies are depicted as enacted and reflected? • How are subjectivities affected/produced/framed by contexts and artefacts, by spaces and places, and the relative temporalities they invite and incite? • How are these articulated by and through, and intersected by, axes of gender, racialisation, national identity, sexualities, coloniality? • How might a Child as method perspective inform and enrich such analyses? A starting point for this Child as method analysis of the text is to see how various terms appear and work. The word ‘child’ occurs in Les Choses seven times in total. It first appears as a feature of the market research Jérôme and Sylvie undertake (as part-time but relatively well-paid work to fund their lifestyle). The second is significant in positioning Jérôme and Sylvie

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generationally, class-wise and financially, and how this positioning frames and constrains their view of themselves and the world: as the children of middle-class families of no substance and then as undifferentiated students without individual form, they had had but a superficial and skimpy view of the world, that is how they began to grasp what it meant to be a person of standing. This concluding revelation, which, strictly speaking was not a revelation at all but the culmination of the long-drawn-out process of their social and psychological maturing, and of which they would not have been able to describe the steps without a great deal of difficulty, put the final touch on their metamorphosis. (42) The story, then, traces their ‘metamorphosis’ (42). Unlike Kafka’s dung beetle, perhaps (and Perec was a lifelong admirer of Kafka) who underwent a partly conscious if also traumatic transformation, Jérôme and Sylvie’s is rather ‘a long-drawn-out process of social and psychological process of maturing’. If ‘maturing’ (43) endows this ‘process’ with some kind of naturalism or inevitability, this perhaps expresses Perec’s political pessimism, as well as indicating his assessment of the conventionality or conformism of these protagonists. The third mention of ‘child’ is in relation to the anticipation of being a family man looking after his children’s education which fills his free time (64) (an eventuality envisaged only as something to be avoided). With one exception, the remaining occurrences appear during their stay in Sfax, during their strategy to ‘run away’ (99). These usages are notable for the ways children appear in scenes with other people and settings that characterise Jérôme and Sylvie’s perception of Tunisia, rather than as situating children according to familial roles or relationships; an implicitly racialised characterisation, perhaps. Hence, fourth: ‘Hundreds of children appeared, then veiled women, policemen dressed in grey poplin, beggars, carts, donkeys, spotless bourgeois’ (103). Fifth: Three men squatting with their backs to the wall were eating bread dipped in oil. Children were running. A woman entirely draped in black or purple veil which covered her eyes as well would sometimes be seen slipping from one house to another. (115) Sixth, a final image as they depart from Sfax for France: ‘jammed with donkeys, children and bicycles, then the endless olive groves’ (122). These are very differently positioned children, depicted as part of a society (that Jérôme and Sylvie do not belong to), whereas (as already indicated)

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in the Epilogue there is a final mention of ‘children’ depicting Jérôme and Sylvie’s future provincial life: ‘Children will be running along a white road’ (126). Other parties are not mentioned here, the children seem to be running ahead, running away, following the individualist trajectory of generationallyspecific racially-privileged progress, thereby, by implication, leaving the now ageing, middle aged, Jérôme and Sylvie behind? In terms of other synonyms for child/children, there is only a single mention of ‘kids’ and a relational kinship term, ‘son’, again occurring as part of the market research patter: And so for years and maybe more they explored and interviewed and analysed. Why are pure-suction vacuum cleaners selling so poorly? What do people of modest Origin think of chicory? Do you like ready-made mashed potato, and if so, why? Because it’s light? Because it’s creamy? Because it’s easy to make – just open it up and there you are? Do people really reckon baby carriages are expensive? Aren’t you always prepared to fork out a bit extra for the good of the kids? Which way will French women vote?. . . And your son, sir, will he be a miner like his father? So what will he be then? There was washing, drying, ironing. Gas, electricity and the telephone. Children. Clothes and underclothes. (37–8). In this reported conversation, Jérôme and Sylvie’s derogatory stance towards the classed positions of their participants is clear. The only other mention of ‘baby’ (other, that is, than ‘baby carriages’, the objects by which to transport babies) occurs as something to be avoided: ‘motivation research . . . was better than baby-sitting, working as a night watchman or as a dishwasher’ (36). Further, neither ‘childish’ nor ‘childlike’ appear (with both gaining only a single mention of each term in A Man Asleep, the second novella accompanying Les Choses in the English edition). Sylvie of course takes classes with and tests her ‘pupils’ (113) in Sfax. Noteworthy here is the reference to disaggregation of age from status wrought by colonial de-development, which also highlights the anomalous character of Sylvie’s job, as in: ‘pupils who were older than she was and didn’t know how to write’ (108). In terms of other generationally oriented categories, as already noted, Jérôme and Sylvie are not qualified by second or familial names and, similarly, no ‘parents’ appear (whereas there are six mentions in A Man Asleep). As for ‘development’, this appears (in explicitly evaluative ways) when introducing Jérôme and Sylvie at the ages of 24 and 22, respectively, in Chapter III, and this qualifies their affective orientations rather than their socio-economic trajectory. ‘No-one knows, in any case, where the untrammelled development of their natural inclinations towards idleness would have led them. There again history had chosen for them’ (35), where Jérôme and Sylvie’s

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‘untrammelled . . . natural inclinations towards idleness’ are depicted as possibly having gone in other directions. Yet it seems they certainly would have been enacted somehow, even if they are not the agents controlling exactly how (since ‘history had chosen for them’). Here, Perec is at his clearest that Jérôme and Sylvie, then, are scarcely the free subjects that their discerning tastes and snobberies would suggest: ‘They would dream of offices, of established posts, of regular hours, of proper contracts of employment. But these reversed images threw them into perhaps even greater despair’ (68). ‘Development’ appears again in relation to Jérôme and Sylvie’s paradoxical suitability as workers for the advertising/marketing agencies, a new (young) industry: ‘the very youth of the agencies themselves, their almost informal state of development, the still total absence of trained staff, held out the prospect, at least potentially, of rapid promotion and a dizzying rise in status’ (36). A third mention of ‘development’ qualifies their emerging and consolidating friendship network: ‘slowly or less slowly, a potential friendship which would develop in stages. In that way, over the years, they had slowly knot together’ (45). The fourth involves key statements about the particular moment at which these young people interpret French national consciousness and economic status, the France of ‘modern developers’, in terms of the people who ‘had managed to solve it for themselves’ as examples to be followed, these wise and smiling, sly and wilful faces full of health, firmness and modesty upholding to eternity the moral and intellectual resilience of the French nation, were nothing less than icons of instilling patience and right feelings in the others, in the ones who lagged behind who stood still, champed their bit, bit the dust, i.e. “modern developers”. (83) ‘Suburban developers’ appears as part of a list of ‘types’ of people the market researchers generated via their categorisations as much as their interviews: They knew all there was to know about the rise of such men kissed by Fortune – captains of industry incorruptible, glittering prize-winners from Ecole Polytechnique, financial wizards, men of letters without a smudge, globe-trotting pioneers, packet-soup salesmen, suburban developers, crooners, playboys, gold-diggers, jugglers of Mammon. (83) Jérôme and Sylvie, like the other precarious workers are doing ok but their youth is starting to tarnish: They were still young and had kept their good looks, with that dull gleam of experience in their eyes, greying hair in their temples to show for their

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years of struggle, with frank, engaging smiles concealing sharp teeth, ­double-jointed fingers, seductive voices. (83) Finally, in terms of development and child-related terms to trace through the text, there are five mentions of ‘teach’, none of them positive: ‘a mediocre degree and then a teaching post with a tiny salary’ (35) as a life trajectory to be warded off; ‘offered teaching jobs in Tunisia’ (this is taken up as a way to get out of the increasingly unsustainable lifestyle of Paris); ‘Then Sylvie began teaching’ (103) (the work in Sfax); ‘He was again offered a teaching job. He wasn’t keen’ (107). (Jérôme, like Perec, avoided working during his time in Tunisia, preferring to read and reflect): ‘Their life went on identically: teaching, expressos at La Régence, old films in the evening, newspapers, crosswords. They were walking in their sleep. They no longer knew what they wanted. They were dispossessed’ (118–9). Here the collective, plural subject ‘they’ is used, even though it is Sylvie who teaches; but the subjective condition (of sleepwalking, not knowing what they want, of being dispossessed) is suggested to be conjoint. This is why Child as method is also necessarily feminist. I  find this depiction of the boredom of the ‘identical’ life in Sfax interesting, as it surely parallels that, albeit more hectic, life of parties, dinners, outings and display in Paris. What Jérôme and Sylvie lack in Sfax, however, is not merely access to the things that they want, even though they have gone there precisely to make the money to be able to return to be able to buy and enjoy them later, but they are alone, without the network of friends, their group, with whom they are identified. Indeed, metonymically, they are this group, in the sense that they are the only identified people of it and in it (other individuals and couples are indicated, but not named; Jérôme and Sylvie are the only named figures throughout.) I have already indicated the role of tense in Les Choses, with the first chapter in the conditional, the tense of desire and aspiration. The final chapter is cast in the definite future, the destiny that lies ahead. Inbetween is what has happened. For it seems that Jérôme and Sylvie are, or become, ‘the things’ (les choses), objectified, alienated, commodified, split off from themselves. Is their investment in objects (furnishings, a nice apartment in a fashionable area of the city, good food, fine wines, etc.) a viable escape from alienating modern social conditions? Is their reconciliation or adjustment to taking a secure job with a salary in the provinces really such a capitulation? To what extent is this trajectory an expression of the outlook of a particular generation at a particular moment in French national consciousness, rather than some kind of natural or inevitable life course? Perec’s anti and decolonial sympathies surely bring significance to how in this novel the sojourn in Sfax seems to play a key role in the subjective

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transformation of Jérôme and Sylvie. This is what demarcates or constellates the moment of disenchantment from consumption, plus the role of the Algerian war (which in Les Choses is presented as a somewhat cosmetic political engagement on Jérôme and Sylvie’s part, although – as noted – it was much more than that for Perec and his contemporaries). Things as material possessions appear to occupy a different role in the colonial/postcolonial context, and when Jérôme and Sylvie encounter the one place in Tunisia that fulfils their fantasy of how they would like to live (based on a place that Perec also visited, as already mentioned), this is portrayed as an encounter that is already too late. Jérôme and Sylvie find themselves changed, and they no longer can be satisfied by the lavish comforts and easy opulence they experience there. While there is no hint of embarrassment about enjoying the spoils of colonialism in this episode, surely Perec’s account leaves open such a reading, as well as the unaccounted-for significance of Sfax as the setting for the change of heart. As regards Child as method, I have already reflected on relative absences as well as the presences of child-related significations. These mostly characterise and help (especially in the light of the flattened psychological orientation of the text) communicate the isolation and societal atomism of Jérôme and Sylvie’s condition. Children in France, in the metropole, are largely absent except as biographical repudiations or alternatively market segments, and their absence surely emphasises the designated ‘immaturity’ of Jérôme and Sylvie and their friends’ lives. The relative visibility of child and children in the Tunisian context, rather than in the sophisticated Parisian lifestyle Jérôme and Sylvie imagine they go there in order to sustain (perhaps the classic expat condition?), should neither be read as exoticising nor romanticising. Jérôme and Sylvie are lost, or unmoored. They assume what they understand as adulthood status only by finally taking on employment and parental responsibilities within conventional models of racialised class mobility and heterosexual reproduction. Notably, this outcome is neither celebrated nor mourned. Perec’s narrative apparently offers only description, rather than evaluation, moralisation or didactic message, albeit investing this with a certain melancholy. Perec on Things: some Child as method tentative conclusions

Notwithstanding the scant references to children and childhoods in Things, which I  have suggested play a part in the flattening of the subjectivities depicted, those that do appear function to organise and orient the text in materially significant ways. Childhood appears at the beginning and end of the text as a generational but also socially weighted category, as a core feature of the (implicitly racialised and) classed orders that Jérôme and Sylvie and their cohort are trying to

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escape or avoid becoming. They want to get away from their ‘middle-class families of no substance’ to become ‘persons of standing’ which, in their terms, means to be wealthy and (so, they presume) carefree. They end up envisioning being part of a landscape where ‘Children will be running along a white road’. It doesn’t matter whether these children are ‘theirs’ in the sense of their having given birth to or parented them. Rather, this image signifies narratively Jérôme and Sylvie’s final subscription to, enlistment within or acquiescence to, that modernist progressivist logic: a logic that positions them as on that road, with the children in front of them, ahead of them, that aligns individual and national development. The image seems to function to indicate a kind of reconciliation to no longer being (so) young, perhaps; of having reluctantly made the deal that they had been avoiding all along. This deal is to settle down, to opt for security (with its investments in futurity) rather than spontaneous ‘living-for-now’, which Jérôme and Sylvie had espoused as existential freedom manifested and lived through consumption. In its spatial, material form – a ‘white road’ (so evocative of a sunlit southern French town) suggests a particular directionality, a normative trajectory that is overdetermined by culture and nation. This is such a corny image, children running along the road that lies before. Perec, the master of parodic lambasting of the banal, the cliché (think of the postcard project and Quel petit vélo . . .), is surely conveying by this Jérôme and Sylvie’s capitulation to capitalist, familialist, bourgeois, heterosexist and nationalist norms. So child functions here as a marker of the racialised classing of generational order, combining the commodified logic of accumulation with that of reproduction to suggest that, in the end for Jérôme and Sylvie, they see no alternative. In a way, Jérôme and Sylvie’s subjective dilemmas and anguish that occupy the bulk of the novel, in addition to tracing those existential concerns about meaning and responsibility that (do or perhaps should?) occupy us all, typify those of a particular racialised class niche. They are part of the White (lower?) middle classes who long to become upper middle class, rather than a proletariat struggling merely to maintain themselves. Yet that longing for upward mobility ushers in temporalities of separation as well as belonging: they want to break with their pasts in order to claim their glorious, rich futures. As an expression of their internal colonisation by the logic of accumulation, they personify commodity fetishism (Lukács, 1972). They even configure their personal and familial backgrounds and histories as useless to them: ‘They had no past, no tradition. There were no inheritances to wait for’. In this sense, they are perhaps the mid-twentieth century equivalent of the new class of semi-skilled young factory workers of the nineteenth century, whose acquisition of a small disposable income through their hard labour above their immediate living needs both boosted capitalism further and also rendered this population politically suspect and in need of compulsory schooling to inculcate compliance and docility (Hoyles, 1989). But Jérôme and Sylvie’s

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generation have, in a more recent era, completed their compulsory schooling and dropped out of undergraduate degrees whose studies failed to engage them. The inheritance that other children of their generation might ‘wait for’ (and so maintain them in the position of children) does not hold them within traditional familial histories and narratives, yet derailed from this narrative (whose material securities and pleasures, they would have much preferred), they have to make their own living and lives: an enforced growing that is not quite, not quite yet, growing up. Chapter II opens with ‘They would have liked to be rich. . . .Their lives would have been an art of living’ (27). Notably, in Things this anomalous class condition is implicitly normatively racialised as White, as a reflection of the dominant culture post-World War II with France as part of the Global North (as market researchers, one of the questions they ask is ‘Would you, Madam, like to rent your room to a Black?’ 38). From that colonial context, it is worth recalling the interpretations of Fanon’s sensitivities to status and nuance encountered in the metropole noted in Black Skin White Masks (Fanon, 1952/1970) which, as well as gross racialised insults, appear in particular to have been heightened by his own class as well as racialised, gendered and heteronormative positionings (Hage, 2010). Looking ahead, Jérôme and Sylvie are also an early depiction of the precariat (Standing, 2011), the people who labour in the ‘gig economy’ of late capitalism undertaking casual, insecure, part-time work. Like their ­nineteenth-century counterparts, their class and racialised privilege, as well as the historical moment in post-War metropolitan France at a time of industrial expansion and production of an increasing array of objects for consumption, allows Jérôme and Sylvie to enter this economy at a sufficiently high level to generate some disposable income. Notably, this only arises because they have configured themselves as having shed familial ties. Indeed, the text conveys a sense of entitlement around this via the naturalisation of or socially sanctioned status of the imperative towards class transition. We do not hear about the economic (or other) conditions of their families that might otherwise absorb their erratic income, and they appear to eschew caring commitments, even if the melancholy that drives the narrative of the novel exposes the sadness and emptiness of this condition. Yet the topic of the book really concerns how they are haunted by this economic insecurity, which also implicitly ushers in a vista of downward as well as upward mobility, alongside how their appetites and desires outstrip their means. They are haunted not only by what they cannot have now, and what they cannot fit into their small apartments or how these are not located in the ‘right’ places, but also by what will happen to them. While in Things the key chronological benchmark, the milestone, is the age of 30, such thresholds still pertain, even if it is now higher in overdeveloped societies (the EU definition of ‘young person’ now extends to the age of 30) or it could be much earlier

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for Majority populations of the Global South. At any rate, Jérôme and Sylvie recognise that their condition is unsustainable, financially, and in the end also emotionally. But, as previously mentioned, Things is not a moralising, judgemental story of the evils of decadence. It merely inhabits and so interrogates Jérôme and Sylvie’s subjectivities. Although they seem relatively impervious to other cultural transformations associated with the 1960s (it is worth noting that the subtitle ‘a story of the sixties’ was only added to the English translation), such as the (socalled) sexual revolution (including the availability of contraception as well as liberalising mores around same sexualities), Jérôme and Sylvie along with their crowd appear as relatively conventional heterosexual couples whose engagement with cultural trends is exclusively through consumption. The only exception to this is the chapter discussing their involvement in anticolonial agitation during the period of the Algerian War of Independence. Perec discusses this as not only a genuine if brief period of politicisation and activism that breaks with the cycle of parties and shopping, but also how this works as yet another all-consuming site of engagement for Jérôme and Sylvie that fulfils the subjective function of giving meaning to their lives, and of postponing what are portrayed as the real existential issues that will have to be sorted out. (Note the tense variations in the text.) As such, Perec is exploring what lies behind the social trope of middle-class sociopolitical conformity and depoliticisation that you can be radical when you are young, and then you (a) grow out of this idealism; (b) become ‘realistic’ and learn that it won’t work so you better get on with things; or (c) have other more pressing concerns to occupy you. The novel is animated by that resistance to the constraints of the perception of what ‘settling down’ means. But the sadness and melancholy of the text arise from the sense that there is no alternative to it. Mark Fisher’s (2009) classic Marxist analysis attends to the pernicious recuperation of all critique by contemporary capitalism. This dynamic can also be seen in the ways Perec’s book was taken up and included in the school curriculum in France. Moreover, the concession to ‘settle down’ is not only a question of surrendering existential, but also of material, ambition – Jérôme and Sylvie’s would really prefer to ‘settle up’, or rather not to ‘settle’ at all but move on and up and up. That elevation, however, is what ties them to prevailing hegemonies. The sociospatial, economic value of movement, of mobility, up and down, is rendered chronological and generational and so naturalised: the white road the children run along in front of them. Perec is showing what ties people into these narratives, into these logics of racial capitalist accumulation, that involve social and cultural as well as biological reproduction. Of course, they are particularly vulnerable subjects for these dynamics. Through their work as market researchers, Jérôme and Sylvie have to be attentive subjects of and recruits to the nuances of status and distinction.

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Their ‘profession’ demands a particular attunement to interpersonal dynamics and minute significations of class stratification through consumption practices. Hence, children also appear in the text via as entities to be serviced (babysitting, feeding) and as sites for display (clothes and toys). They are part of the lists of things and constructed needs about which Jérôme and Sylvie interview their participants. They are not subjects who exercise their own choices or assert their own needs or entitlements. Similarly in Tunisia, as noted, children appear as part of scenes, and the flattening of generational relations here perhaps indicates Jérôme and Sylvie’s disinterest and lack of engagement with that setting. Indeed, their metropolitancultivated and oriented tastes – notwithstanding their misfit status in the expat cadre in Sfax – render them much more unreconstructedly colon in subjective orientation than even orientalists. They can see nothing to buy in the souks and shops. Their apartment is empty and bare. It is this affective disengagement, their imaginative preoccupation organised around modernity and the Global North, that they experience via the rupture of things no longer calling to them. This epitomises their subjective separation, their ‘exile’, and what marks their ‘metamorphosis’ into taking the step to ‘settle down’. It is depicted as a slow but dramatic crisis: with nothing to desire or want, they realise not only that they have nothing, but that they are nothing in a different way from the sense of being crushed by their exclusion by the landed plenty of southern France that had galvanised their ‘escape’ to Tunisia. As a lens through which to interpret the claims about materialism, this Child as method analysis highlights how child and children reflect and help organise the principal themes of Things. The ‘things’ at issue are not only possessions – whether actually owned or desired, or indeed researched about, in their ‘motivation research’. Perec offers the reader his own ‘motivation research’, his own interrogations of the forms of subjectivity mobilised and organised around commodity production and consumption. My reading of Perec here has attended to the figure of child, and the relationships constellated (or absent) around child and children in securing this. Jérôme and Sylvie are, as subjects under capitalism, alienated, thingified, and their relationships (if not with each other – for we hear little about this – but with other others) are instrumentalised and without meaning. They are rendered inhuman subjects or rather products of the work of capitalist logics as much as the artefacts they desire. Human and nonhuman relations are therefore interrogated in depth in Things, as well as distributed between city and countryside, and colonial centre and periphery. Time and space are affectively charged with ambition, disaffection, and boredom such that the boundaries between humans and more (or less than) humans cannot be sustained. The agential capacities accorded Jérôme and Sylvie, as the youthful protagonists, are shown to be undermined by their status as the expression of a generational and sociological type, as well as relativised by their de-interiorised

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representation and the greater narrative emphasis on materials, settings, contexts. This is the kind of work ‘new materialism’ describes well, but Perec describes it in such a way as to invite transformation of this condition, as a historical materialist analysis. If Things concerns the complex, captivating but ultimately unsatisfying qualities of objects, whether as possessions, matter for gastronomic consumption or for display within as well as beyond exchange and stratification processes, I move now to consider an account where things are accorded further independent agentic capacities, The Lives of Things by José Saramago. Saramago is a historical materialist who does what new materialism does but also engages its wider geopolitical axes and dimensions. References Balkoski, K. T. (2020). Car il y a beaucoup d’appelés, mais peu d’élus: Military Conscription in French Literary Representations of the Algerian War [Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Colombia]. Bellos, D. (2001). Putting grammar to work: Tense and mood in Perec’s Prose. Sites, 5(2), 283–298. Bellos, D. (2004). ‘Introduction’ to Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour?/Which moped with chrome-plated handlebars at the back of the yard? (I. Monk, Trans.). In Three by Perec (pp. 5–7). Godine Press. Bellos, D. (2010). Georges Perec: A life in words. Random House. Benjamin, W. (1986). Illuminations. Random House. Benjamin, W. (2021). Radio Benjamin. Verso. Bonch-Osmolovskaya, T. (2018, July). Combinatorial greetings from Georges Perec. In Proceedings of bridges 2018: Mathematics, art, music, architecture, education, culture (pp.  253–258). Retrieved from https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2018/ bridges2018-253.pdf Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Burman, E. (2015). Educational intimacies: Writing bodily relations in early childhood and education. In A. B. Reinertsen  & A. M. Otterstad (Eds.), Metodefestival og Øyeblikksrealisme [Method-celebration/party and moments of realism] (pp. 180–197). Fagbokforlaget. Burman, E. (2020). Developments: Child, image, nation (2nd ed.). Routledge. Burman, E. (2023). Child as method and/as childism: Conceptual–political intersections and tensions. Children & Society, 37(4), 1021–1036. Campos, A. S. (2018). José Saramago’s “magical” historical materialism. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 61–80). Palgrave Macmillan. Caselli, D. (2016). Attack of the Easter bunnies: Walter Benjamin’s youth hour. Parallax, 22(4), 459–479. Crawley Jackson, A. (2019). Islands, camps, zones: Towards a nissological reading of Perec. In C. Forsdick, A. Leak, & R. Phillips (Eds.), George Perec’s geographies: Material, performative and textual spaces (pp. 95–110). UCL Press.

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Davidson, N. (1998). Naming la Guerre sans nom: Memory, nation and identity in French representations of the Algerian War, 1963–1992. Paroles gelées, 16(2), 64–90. Donahue, M. (2020). Apocalyptic allegories and post-apocalyptic utopias: Saramago’s A Caverna and Sánchez and Pita’s Lunar Braceros. ASAP/Journal, 5(1), 129–151. Duncan, D. (2019). The Oulipo and modern thought. Oxford University Press. Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press. Ellena, L. (2001). Remembering Fanon, forgetting Africa. Journal of Romance Studies, 1(3), 35–51. Fanon, F. (1952/1970). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans). Paladin. Fanon, F. (1959/1965). A dying colonialism (H. Chevalier, Trans.). Grove. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books. Forsdick, C., Leak, A.,  & Phillips, R. (2019). (Eds.). George Perec’s geographies: Material, performative and textual spaces. UCL Press. Giannopoulou, Z. (2014). Prisoners of plot in José Saramago’s The Cave. Philosophy and Literature, 38(2), 332–349. Hage, G. (2010). The affective politics of racial mis-interpellation. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(7–8), 112–129. Hall, S. M. (2020). Revisiting geographies of social reproduction: Everyday life, the endotic, and the infra-ordinary. Area, 52(4), 812–819. Hoyles, M. (1989). The politics of childhood. Journeyman Press. James, A. (2009). Constraining chance: Georges Perec and the OuLiPo. Northwestern University Press. Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. B. (1967). The language of psycho-analysis. Routledge. Lazreg, M. (2022, June  29). French revisionism and the erasure of the Algerian revolution. Anticapitalist Resistance. https://anticapitalistresistance.org/ french-revisionism-and-the-erasure-of-the-algerian-revolution/ Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labor. In P. Virno  & M. Hardy (Eds.), Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics (pp. 133–147). University of Minnesota Press. Leak, A. (2019). The mapping of loss. In C. Forsdick, A. Leak, & R. Phillips (Eds.), George Perec’s geographies: Material, performative and textual spaces (pp. 17–29). UCL Press. Lukács, G. (1972). History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics. MIT Press. Mathews, H. (1983). Georges Perec. Grand Street, 3(1), 136–145. Mills, C. W. (2014). White time: The chronic injustice of ideal theory. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 11(1), 27–42. Monk, I., & Becker, D. L. (Eds.) (2019). All that is evident is suspect. Readings from the Ouplipo 1963–2018. McSweeney. Morley, D. (2015). Cultural studies, common sense and communications: The infraordinary, the interdisciplinary and the particular. Cultural Studies, 29(1), 23–31. Parr, L. (2022). Postcards for Perec. Linda Parr Publishing. Perec, G. (1966). Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour?/Which moped with chrome-plated handlebars at the back of the yard? (I. Monk, Trans.). In Three by Perec. Godine Press and Denoël. Perec, G. (1967a). Un homme qui dort. Denoël. (Published in English alongside Things.)

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Perec, G. (1967b). Things: A story of the sixties. Grove Press. (First published as Les Choses in 1965, Julliard Press.) Perec, G. (1969/2008). A Void/La Disparition (G. Adair, Trans.). Vintage. Perec, G. (1975/1988). W, or the memory of childhood (D. Bellos, Trans.) first published as W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Denöel. Perec, G. (1999). Species of spaces and other pieces (J. Sturrock, Ed.  & Trans.). Penguin. Perec, G. (2008/2011). L’art et la manière d’aborder son chef de service pour lui demander une augmentation. Hachette/The art of asking your boss for a raise (D. Bellos, Trans.). Verso. Phillips, R. (2018). Georges Perec’s experimental fieldwork; Perecquian fieldwork. Social & Cultural Geography, 19(2), 171–191. Pontalis, J. B. (1975). A partir du contre-transfert: le mort et le vif entrelacés. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, 12, 81–82. Rubin, E. B. (2014). Georges Perec, lost and found in the void: The memoirs of an indirect witness. JML: Journal of Modern Literature, 37(3), 111–126. Salzani, C. (2018). Correcting history: Apocalypticism, messianism and Saramago’s philosophy of History. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 19–37). Springer. Salzani, C.,  & Vanhoutte, K. K. (Eds.). (2018). Saramago’s philosophical heritage. Springer. Smith, D. (2019). Species of spaces and the politics of scale: Perec, Gaullism and geography after Lefebre. In C. Forsdick, A. Leak, & R. Phillips (Eds.), George Perec’s geographies: Material, performative and textual spaces (pp. 65–77). UCL Press. Sousa, R. W. (2000). José Saramago ‘revises’, or Out of Africa and into Cyber-history. Discourse, 22(3), 73–86. Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury. Terry, P. (Ed.). (2019). The Penguin book of Oulipo: Queneau, Perec, Calvino and the adventure of form. Penguin. Zivin, E. G. (2012). Seeing and saying: Towards an ethics of truth in José Saramago’s” “Ensaio sobre a Lucidez”. SubStance, 41(1), 109–123.

10 SARAMAGO With one arm left in Africa

The Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author, José Saramago (1922–2010) wrote more than 30 books, albeit not gaining fame until later life, of which The Lives of Things (1978/2012), the text I make my focus here, was a middle work. As with my analysis of Perec’s Les Choses, I will start with some biographical and geopolitical context, before moving on to analyse the specific text and what I propose it helps disclose about materialisms via Child as method. Saramago was from a working-class background and for financial reasons went to technical, rather than grammar school. He qualified in manual trades, working initially as a lathe operator and then car mechanic. As already mentioned, he was a lifelong member of the (hard-line Stalinist) Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and a committed socialist, politically active even to the extent of being taking part in elections. He ran for the Democratic Union Coalition for positions in the EU parliament (albeit with no hope of winning) and was a known critic of the EU and IMF policies. This political perspective is clear in his writing, which indicates its historical materialist commitments and regional affinities in the focus on global or national errors that take the form of conflict or pose dilemmas, whose navigations by ordinary people he then traces. His plots follow people’s experiences of features of state infrastructure to interrogate structures of power, the superstructure. His identification with the oppressed, and with the challenges and experiences of the labouring classes is evident in his attention to the effects on them of the deployment of national, transnational and bureaucratic forms of power.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-14

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As such, specific material conditions or contexts pose key problems for the characters as the basic constitutive elements of the plots. Saramago’s exploration of impossible or unlikely situations works as speculative fiction to set in motion the subjective and objective transformative processes that characterise proletarian mobilisation and revolution. As Campos (2018, p. 73) puts it: Saramago’s version of subjective idealism in an objective materialist setting renders this kind of species-consciousness as a main driving force of most of his plots, in a Feuerbachian way; however, such a consciousness is relevant always in a bottom-up direction, that is, in a Marxist way. That is, Saramago is, despite his membership of the PCP, what Lenin termed an ‘intelligent idealist’, a historical materialist (Sabine 2016). Reflecting his deep engagements with history and historiography, including what history is used to legitimate and how such accounts can be destabilised, many of Saramago’s books are based on actual historical examples. In some ways, Baltasar and Blimunda (entitled in Portuguese Memorial do Convento) (1982/1987) could be read as highly dualist (Blimunda collects souls as they leave bodies). On the other hand, this is not only said to be based on a story about a woman who was able to do this but is also primarily concerned with labour and economic duress. The book is based on the actual historical example of the building of the Convent of Mafra in the eighteenth century (now a major tourist attraction). Saramago offers detailed evocations of grinding poverty, exploitation and backbreaking – often futile – work, alongside conscripted military and indentured service, injury and disability. He depicts the feudal relations structuring the condition of a displaced peasantry who are forced into joining the expedition to find the means to live (meagrely) and highlights the disparity of perspective between the officers, the aristocrats and the suffering labourers. But there is also a love story, interwoven in complex ways with another strange but historical event: the visit of the Italian Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti to Portugal and the invention of an early flying machine. Finally, crossing the gender and class relations is the religious persecution of the Inquisition. Yet even where it is historical, Saramago’s writing is not simply historical fiction, and notwithstanding its playfulness and intertextual references, it is not merely postmodernist, since he does not repudiate the making of truthclaims. Rather, he offers a kind of ‘anti-history’ (Salzani, 2018, p. 22) vis-à-vis patriotic myths and sanctioned historiography that could be said to offer moments of interruption or possible transition. In this sense, his philosophy of history aligns with Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. That is, it partakes of an unorthodox Marxist tradition of emancipative (re)readings of history and shares with these philosophies some fundamental traits: the view of

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history as catastrophe, the anti-utopianism, the vindication of the history of the vanquished, the simultaneist perspective, and the feeling of living on the verge of an epochal change, and so on. (Salzani, 2018, p. 23) In his authoritative evaluation, Sabine (2001) claims that Saramago demonstrates a deep commitment to historical materialism as praxis in his writings, while distancing himself from scientific Marxist dogmatism. This is indicated by Saramago’s emphasis on correcting the historical record and his sensitivity to social and political justice, vindicating those who have been silenced (including women’s agency in history). Saramago is recorded as having said in an interview in 1990: [w]hen I say correcting, correcting History, it is not in the sense of correcting historical facts, since this cannot ever be the task of the novelist, but rather of introducing little explosive charges in it which will blow up what to that moment appeared as unquestionable; in other words, of substituting what could have been for what actually was . . . this new operation will introduce, as it were, an instability, a vibration, caused precisely by the disturbance of what could have been, which is perhaps as useful for understanding our present as the factual, proven demonstration of what actually happened. (quoted in Salzani, 2018, p. 25) The task Saramago identifies is ‘to transform our reality and not to wait until it changes naturally, while only in the future will the results of this transformation be available’ (quoted in Salzani, 2018, p.  28). Hence, all his work is infused with a demand for action, whilst remaining resolutely opposed to any utopia. Across the diverse and challenging scenarios he depicts, his writing takes the form of a ‘usual pattern of a bleak historical situation, (slightly) lighted up by a flickering spark of hope embodied by a female figure’ (Salzani, 2018, p. 32). (Unsurprisingly, this idealisation of women has attracted some critical attention, Ferreira, 2018; Santiago, 2018). His writing can be characterised as a distinctive kind of magic realism – ‘non-naturalist elements prompt the development of a new kind of nature, one that reproduces how real nature would react if subject to impossible situations’ (Campos, 2018, p. 62). These concerns also enter into his speculative fiction – for example, The Stone Raft (1994, originally published as A Jangada de Pedra, 1986), where the Iberian Peninsula detaches itself from Europe and starts floating across the Atlantic Ocean towards the USA. Not only is the reader treated to explorations of what is happening to the land and to the territory but also to the reactions and responses of national governments and transnational

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relations to this rapidly changing geopolitical situation. Saramago also deals with how this unique event affects specific individuals, who both create new forms of relationships and livelihoods in these unprecedented conditions, but also elaborate ways of making sense of this bizarre and (even to them) unbelievable predicament, even to the extent of elaborating (via associating particular actions or sights or new qualities acquired at the moment of this seismic change) some sense of responsibility for and claimed agencies over it. Sabine (2001) counters both utopian and separatist nationalist interpretations of The Stone Raft which, notably, was published in the year of Portugal’s declared commitment to join the EEC. The split he depicts in the Iberian Peninsula at the Pyrenees may be silent over Basque and Catalan nationalism, perhaps because he is primarily concerned with the Portuguese context, but Saramago undoes all nationalist and even regionalist romanticisms. Sabine proposes that while Saramago certainly disputes the mechanism and determinism of scientific Marxism, his text demonstrates, ‘first, its championing of the praxis of socialist revolution, and second, the full range of its postmodernist questioning of the nature of knowledge and historiography’ (185). Sabine concludes: The Stone Raft’s inconclusive and unpromising ending argues that, even when the reassuring certainties of materialist analysis of history prove illfounded, life, the struggle to make life better and fairer, must go on. The only certainty, in Portugal, Spain or elsewhere, is that the actions of the common people must be added to the rhetoric of politicians and novelists, if a better society is to be built out of a humanity fragmented by economic, ethnic and generic divisions. (199) Such historical materialist commitments also inform Saramago’s engagement with classic philosophical debates. A Caverna/The Cave (2000/2002) counterposes human creativity and dexterity with matter (in the skilled fingers of the potter) with the emptiness and alienation of institutionalised consumption, as a contemporary reading of Plato’s ‘The Cave’ (Giannopoulou, 2014). Again, this brings to the fore the subjective as well as economic and environmental challenges posed by late capitalism, as both constructing and obscuring how people see and engage with each other and the world around them (indeed, Menditto, 2018, reads this as indicative of Saramago’s phenomenological commitments). So many of Saramago’s texts can be read as both humanist and materialist, in the best sense of each. Even his exploration of what would happen if people stopped dying is an analysis of bureaucratic and institutional processes, as well as highlighting the absurdity of the nation-state as a bounded entity. Saramago even manages to extend human attributes or feelings towards Death, who (in As Intermitências da Morte/

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Death with Interruptions, 2005/2008) becomes romantically entangled with a human and decides to go on strike from her work of issuing death notices and guiding people on their final journeys, as well as being unsparing in his depictions of who benefits from the dead and the dying. As ever with Saramago’s novels, there is a relatively familiar situation, and then something small happens that changes everything. This is what Jenkins (2018), names the ‘catastrophic counterfactual’ (211), by means of which Saramago ‘offers his reader a partial corrective to his own diagnosis of present liberal optimism and complacency’ (Salzani & Vanhoutte, 2018a, p. 13). His stories open with a fantastic situation of imagined disaster and trace moves toward an uncertain, as yet to be determined, future. ‘The true essence of the events Saramago considers is not so much to do with their impossibility as with their suddenness and the reactions this precipitates in both people and institutions’ (Jenkins, 2018, p. 217). That is, Saramago invents traumatic exceptions, open endings. He is not interested in causes, although those precipitating conditions and challenges posed for his characters are often indeed very arduous. Rather, by charting the necessarily fragile, self-serving responses offered up by our institutions and representations, Saramago always foregrounds the shape of the resistance that must be mounted in the teeth of both collective trauma and political failure. These failures and that resistance are rooted in that dense and complex morass we call human nature. . . . Saramago offers a glimpse of the always hard-won solidarities are needed to take us beyond trauma and to a more just future. (Jenkins, 2018, p. 229) Having now established Saramago’s materialist (and other political and philosophical) credentials, I now move on to discuss how his treatment of childhood fits with this. Saramago’s childhood philosophy and a more-than-human approach

Saramago offers extensive evocation and reflection on his own (relative to Perec’s) happier and more secure childhood in As Pequenas Memórias/Small Memories (2006/2010), with ‘small’ designating minor, as in fragmentary and fleeting, as well as biographically early. As he puts it: ‘Nothing of great note, you might say. Maybe that’s why this book changed its name and became Small Memories. Yes, the small memories of when I was small’ (28). Descriptions in this text support the interpretation that the relatively few references to children and childhood in The Lives of Things, the text that I discuss later, are significant. In Small Memories, Saramago offers clear indications of his

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subscription to the romantic and nostalgic model of childhood authenticity characterising modernity, but as I will show, he mobilises this in specific ways. This authentic model is, however, explicitly indicated in the epigraph to the book, attributed to The Book of Exhortations: ‘Let yourself be led by the child you were’ (1). That child, the one that Saramago was, is a poor, country boy. The book is full of lyrical descriptions of his times in Azinhaga, the village of his grandparents, and conveys the sense of simple living in and with the land and nature, which he claims as a child came ‘naturally’ to him. He writes: The child I was did not see the landscape as the adult he became would be tempted to see if from the lofty height of manhood. The child, while he was a child, was simply in the landscape, formed part of it and never questioned it, never said or thought in these or other words: “What a beautiful landscape, what a magnificent panorama, what a fabulous view”. (5, emphasis original) This is a conception of child as immersed in nature and lacking in the selfconsciousness that alienates or separates adults from the spontaneity and connection to their sensory experiences. It is also a model of what might be termed the wise child (a child that is absent from Perec’s Things), the child uncorrupted by modernity and capitalism, who is other to adult, unalienated from body and nature, before the ravages of modern life rob us (and Saramago does presume he speaks of a general experience here) of what adults (should) know. A fuller evocation, that also demonstrates the biographical link with the mood and scene of the final story in The Lives of Things, discussed later, comes early on in the text: No one can know everything or ever will, but there are moments when we’re capable of believing that we will, perhaps because at that moment, soul, consciousness, mind, or whatever you care to call the thing that makes us more or less human, was filled to overflowing. I gaze down from the bank at the barely moving current, the almost stagnant water and, absurdly, I imagine that everything would go back to being as it was if I could once again plunge my childhood nakedness into the river if I could grasp in today’s hands the long, damp pole or the sonorous oars of yesteryear, and propel across the water’s smooth skin the rustic boat that used to carry, to the very frontiers of dreams, the being I was then and whom I left stranded somewhere in time. (7–8) The nostalgic desire to go back, to return ‘to being as it was’ is of a piece with the romantic poets and novelists of the nineteenth century. Yet the normative

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tales of rural, natural childhood are also recruited to identify a better time before – not only before adulthood (as the narrative of romantic childhood would invite) but also comments such as ‘In those times and in those places, things were what they appeared to be’ (124) lead into recollections of the beginnings of the civil war and dictatorship; that is, the specific, geopolitical conditions that characterised Saramago’s own adolescence, as well as the clarity of youthful perception, that he contrasts with the unnatural/bad world of adults, rather than children. The same alignment is made even with his – quite extensive – tales of early (hetero)sexual exploration with girls, which end with the comment: ‘Ah, yes, those were innocent times’ (34). While this confers a naturalness on (cisgendered) bodily sensuality and heteronormative erotic expression, the break from the more ‘natural’ life in the countryside with the move into Lisbon also, significantly, brings in the first mention of the civil war in Spain as well as confirming the dictatorship in Portugal. Thus Saramago situates his ‘natural’ childhood as a past that is collective as well as individual. Describing how he and his grandparents would use the fields for their toilet, he comments ‘And the reader should not be surprised by that euphemistic turn of phrase “do our business”. It was the law of nature. Even Adam and Eve had to do their business in some corner of paradise’ (127), which also incidentally brings in his earthy and earthly secularist commitments. Equally, in terms of his universalist identifications, he discusses ‘my famous Berber (or rather Moorish) great-grandfather’ (56). This man is described in positively racialised terms, albeit as endowed with the racist stereotype of predatory sexuality. He had a reputation for attracting women into liaisons from which they became pregnant, including Saramago’s greatgrandmother, which other men seemed powerless to prevent. Overall, Saramago presents his story as that of a man of humble origins, of peasant and even migrant background, with strong affiliation and connection to the land. In contrast perhaps, to the ‘catastrophes’ or major challenges that form the starting point for so many of his books, Saramago portrays his childhood and growing up as involving relatively ‘normal’, childhood occurrences. These include some difficult and potentially traumatic experiences including recurring nightmares, falls in the playground, and an episode of particularly vicious sexual bullying by other boys. Further painful reflections include being beaten by his father and witnessing the beatings the latter he gave his mother (unavoidably, since they all slept in the one bedroom). Significant perhaps for his identification with poor and working people and his political commitments is the grinding poverty of his childhood, which he does not dwell upon but is clearly present. At one point, he comments (with characteristic direct address to the reader): To give you a clear idea of the situation, I need only say that for years, with absolute regularity, my mother used to pawn the blankets as soon as

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winter was over, only to retrieve them once the cold weather began to bite again and she had saved enough to pay back the monthly interest and the amount of the loan. (87) Even within Lisbon, the family moved ten times in under ten years, for reasons that remain unclear to Saramago but must have concerned his father’s changing jobs. His childhood activities and misdemeanours are also both implicitly and explicitly identified as fostering resources for his later writing. He discusses how he became an inveterate liar at school, especially inventing plots for films he hadn’t seen in order to impress his classmates, which could be understood as the basis for his later storytelling abilities. Explicitly, he comments on how his lack of success at fishing nevertheless yielded other gains: ‘many hours spent in vain (well, none were spent in vain, because, without my realizing it, I was “fishing” for things that would be just as important for me in the future, images, smells, sounds, soft breezes, sensations)’ (73). His reflections include playful musing around what early memories might have inspired his later books, as in: it is quite possible that the memory of that awful moment was still lurking somewhere in my mind when, in 1980 or 1981, I once again gazed upon the vast bult of the palace and the powers of the basilica and said to the people with me: “One day, I’d like to put all this in a novel”. I can’t swear to it, I’m just saying it’s possible. (68) while he explicitly notes how his novel Todos os Nomes/All the names (1997/1999) drew on his earlier efforts to check out facts about his brother’s death in registry offices. By contrast with Perec’s searches for traces of his parents within his life and psyche, Saramago boasts a robust sense of generational positioning that even carries some sense of oedipal triumph. He narrates the story of how the name Saramago originated from a nickname (meaning ‘wild radish’) given to his family in the village, and how the drunken clerk who registered his birth added this to the name ‘José de Sousa’, that his father had intended. As a result of this, since the difference in names aroused suspicion, his now policeman father felt obliged to ‘reregister himself under the name “José de Sousa Saramago”. This must be, I imagine, be the only case in the whole history of humanity of a son giving his name to his father’ (39). These are the kind of stories that a child learns about from his close relatives (and it is also clear he was very close to his mother, as well as grandparents), and they emphasise that sense of secure network and familial-generational

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positioning available to him as a child (even as he also lost an older brother in his early life). Also relevant to Child as method is Saramago’s attention to ideological (nationalist, religious, bourgeois, if not also heteropatriarchal) relations enacted in stories of childhood and generation. This is perhaps best exemplified in his rendering of the life story of that most important and ‘holy (boy) child’ for Western culture, Jesus, in his O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo/ The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991, published in English in 1993). This account, suggesting an all too prosaic biography of a mortal man, is perhaps Saramago’s most obvious deconstruction of the status of the child in Eurocentric culture and beyond, a text whose offence to the Catholic church was such that the Pope tried to prevent the award of the Nobel Prize to Saramago (unsuccessfully as it turned out). Similar sentiments are expressed in Small Memories, when he discusses Christmas in the village and how, rather than Father Christmas, it was Baby Jesus who came down the chimney then, he didn’t just lie in the straw, belly button on view, waiting for the shepherds. . . .In those days, Baby Jesus was a worker, who tried to be useful to society, a proletarian like the rest of us. (104) Indeed, Saramago in this memoir portrays children as workers, as contributors to household economies, as well as ordinary people’s struggles. His anti-Catholicism, which he traces as starting in childhood, is also indicated here. Like Perec, Saramago explores the unreliability of memory and recall in relation to the status of his account, but his considerations are cast in generalised, normative terms: ‘we don’t remember or don’t wish to remember what went on in our heads as children’ (27); having been buried for years beneath many layers of forgetting, those names . . . rose obediently from the depths of memory when summoned by necessity, like a cork float held fast on the riverbed, but which suddenly breaks free of the accumulated mud. (30) Similarly, he mobilises his own experiences presuming these to be indicative of everyone else’s, instating a presumed common set of understandings of childhood as well as adulthood: I don’t know how children perceive time now, but as a child in those faroff days, time seemed to be made up of a particular kind of hour, each one

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of which was slow, dragging, interminable. A few more years had to pass before we began to understand, as we had to, that each hour had only sixty minutes and, later still, we would learn that every minute, without exception, ended after sixty seconds. (54) This contrasts with Perec’s sense of isolation and individual search for memory and meaning, structured by his sense of his own and others’ dislocation and trauma. Nevertheless, Saramago, like Perec, plays with questions of truth and construction, especially in the context of narrative authority and the tricks the author can play: Sometimes I wonder if certain memories are really mine or if they’re just someone else’s memories of episodes in which I was merely an unwitting actor and which I found out later when they were told to me by others who had been there, unless, of course, they too, had only heard the story from someone else. (53) There is also a reflection on how ageing brings, perhaps unwanted, memorial privileges and ethical temptations to wilfully authorise or steal others’ memories: I still have a baby photo of Francisco, the brother who died of bronchial pneumonia at four years old, in December 1924. I have occasionally thought I could claim it as a photo of myself and thus enrich my personal iconography, but I never have. And it would be the easiest thing in the world given that, with my parents dead, there would be no one to gainsay me, but stealing the image of one who had already lost his life always seemed to me to show an unforgivable lack of respect, to be an inexcusable indignity. (55) Here the constructions of child put forward are positioned as produced from the standpoint of an older man whose greater age carries with it a melancholy authority, since others who could confirm, or disconfirm, these memories are now no more, as he recognises will also eventually be the case for him. (Saramago was in his eighties when he wrote this memoir, and he died only four years after its publication, in 2010.) Perhaps as a reflection on the debates about constructed or recovered memories that were circulating in the 1990s, not long before the writing of this memoir, he comments (with characteristic wryness): I don’t really believe in so-called false memories, I  think the difference between those and the memories we consider certain and solid is merely

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a question of confidence, the confidence that we place in the incorrigible vagueness we call certainty. (109) The sleight of hand in highlighting the circularity of the relationships between confidence and certainty highlights that this matter can only be further complicated rather than resolved. At another point, what looks like another consideration about the nature of memorial accounting then veers into a sociopolitical comment about the commonalities of the dictators of the mid-twentieth century, as a segue into his recollections of rallies and exhortations to join the fascist Portuguese Youth Movement (Mocidade Portuguesa): We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightest stimulus, and there’s no explanation for that; we don’t summon them up, they are simply there. And it is these memories that tell me that although, at the time, I was basing myself more on intuition than, of course, on any real knowledge of the facts, Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar were, in my view, all chips off the same block, first cousins, each with the same iron hand, the only difference being the thickness of the velvet and how tightly the hand could squeeze. (131) In sum, Saramago’s relatively much more secure, as well as rural, childhood, would appear to inform the livelier or more autonomously animate range of conceptions of things portrayed in The Lives of Things. His political commitments are indicated with a light touch in Small Memories, overshadowed by the weight of biographical details, rather than the latter explicitly being deployed as a means of merely confirming or warranting his present views. It could be said that, along with the alignment of (his) childhood with nature, this also implicitly conveys a naturalness or assumed obviousness to the communist commitments he espoused throughout his adult life (which, it should be said, never appear in programmatic or dogmatic terms in his novels). Beyond this, noteworthy also is his engagement and support for environmental projects, as indicated by the Foundation set up in his name to defend and support human rights, Portuguese culture and environmental activism in the context of global warming. This Foundation asserts a particularly Saramagoan humanism, with the (rather bizarre) English translation of the website blurb claiming that we are attentive to the voices of the world, to the beauty that men can produce and to the pain and isolation they suffer, and that is why we try to [sic] that the concept of hope is something more than an empty and rhetorical word. We do not need, in order to intervene and be, authorizations or permissions from anyone, it is enough for us to know that we are

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human and that we want to contribute to the process of humanization that a world in permanent process of dehumanization needs. https://www. josesaramago.org/sobre/, (accessed December 4, 2022) Expressed here is a version of Saramago’s radical humanist philosophy that is inclusionary rather than exclusionary, attentive to the suffering and oppressions meted out in the name of humanity (as indicated by his various dystopic novels), but also claiming the possibility that humans can together make changes to ward off political and planetary extinction. As Salzani and Vanhoutte (2018b, p. 203) point out: Saramago’s project remains thoroughly humanist and yet his is a humanism à la Montaigne, stripped of and freed from the blinders that fooled an entire tradition into the belief of human exceptionalism. His humanism looks for the human away from the normative (and “failed”) model, in the fringes, in the traditionally minor or incomplete forms of humanity. . . .Saramago redeems the humanist project by decentering the human and placing it side by side with dogs in a transformative “dance of encounters”. In the end it is the god who saves humanity. In terms of specific more-than-human expressions in Saramago’s works, Salzani and Vanhoutte (2018a, 2018b) note how dogs appear in many of his novels, and in some of them, they ascend to the rank of central characters . . . they not only constitute a powerful and captivating artistic device but also endow his work with a strong politicalphilosophical charge. (194) While in some respects Saramago mobilises traditional humanist ways of recruiting dogs as a mirror to human narcissism – that is, as guides, as indicating social critique (the mongrel highlighting social inequalities), nevertheless Salzani and Vanhoutte (2018b) explicitly link to Haraway’s (1988) account of situated knowledges as well as companion species (Haraway, 2003), in highlighting the more-than-human orientation espoused by Saramago. This is specifically linked to the symbolism and interrogation of blindness and seeing, sensorial, political and cultural-historically loaded capacities whose significance Saramago explores at length in his books of these titles (Ensaio sobre Enceguera/Blindness, 1995/1997, and Ensaoi sobre Lucidez/ Seeing 2004/2006). The idealised depiction of dogs can also be read alongside his idealisation of women, (notwithstanding his – significant – failure to make women principal characters in any of his novels) as a paternalist

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and a compassionate humanism rather than deconstructing human–animal (or gendered) relations. Yet ‘by bestowing on dogs the positive qualities he denied humans, he ended up confounding the divide separating humans and animals and deconstructing the traditional idea of “human nature” erected upon the negation of animality’ (Salzani & Vanhoutte, 2018b, p. 201). They quote from interviews with the author: Though starting from a very different (still all-too-humanist) standpoint, Saramago echoes Haraway’s (2008) dictum that “we have never been human” (i.e. the philosopher’s “human”) when he states that “we are not really human, if being human means to orient oneself through reason, sensibility and respect” (quoted in Gómez Aguilera, 2010, p. 108). “Perhaps”, he explained, with an image, “we are travelling a long and endless path leading us to the human being. Perhaps, I don’t know where or when, we will eventually succeed in becoming what we have to be”. (ibid., p. 99). (203) Indeed, a childhood memorial account conjoins relations with nature, the environment and his connection with his extended family, inviting a sense of generational continuity emphasised through a shared connection with the land and nature He recalls his grandfather in later life, anticipating his death: He doesn’t yet know he will have a presentiment that the end has come and will go from tree to tree in his garden, embracing their trunks and saying good-bye to them, to their friendly shade, to the fruits he will never eat again. (119–120) Objecto Quase (1978)/The Lives of Things (2012)

Like Perec, Saramago was very distinctive stylistically. Some of his stories are composed of long, long sentences, with dialogue often unattributed or unmarked by punctuation, and such features are, variably, present in the text I have already presented as well as analysed later. The unmarking of dialogue already undoes the boundary between character and text and destabilises identities. As Costa (2001, p.  40) notes: ‘The configuration of Saramago’s characters in a tension between the pole of anonymity and greater individual density versus that of nomination and lesser subjective density seems to constitute a vector in a good part of Saramago’s recent novels’. Also, across his writing, there is either anonymity of key characters or the use of very common Portuguese names which can be said to thwart ideal-typical images of either hero or antihero. In this sense, the characters are de-specified and potentially generalised. This collective focus is aligned with other dystopian

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writers such as H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and Malcolm Bradbury, as well as recalling the cypher status of Jérôme and Sylvie in Perec’s Les Choses/Things (discussed in Chapter 9). Also noted by various commentators is that Saramago often focuses on middle-aged male characters as prototypical subjects, as workers, consumers, people making sense of living under capitalist (or other) social conditions. While this centres the canonical European modern subject, it would seem this works specifically to topicalise ‘his’ limitations. Saramago’s writings revel in allegory and parable, yet despite their ‘magic realism’, the messages remain largely implicit. While, unlike Perec, there are occasional direct addresses to the reader by the author, these – like Perec, however – effect an estrangement of the illusion of writing by drawing attention to the work of crafting. (Bellos, 2010, notes that Perec was very influenced by the viewing of a Brecht play at an early age.) Here, I focus on a collection of short stories entitled Objecto Quase (1978) translated as The Lives of Things (2012). Once again, the questions brought to this text by Child as method can be summarised as follows: • What models of human and more-than-human relations are at play? • What do things do in The Lives of Things? What material political and affective economies are depicted as enacted and reflected? • How are subjectivities affected/produced/framed by contexts and artefacts, by spaces and places, and the relative temporalities they invite and incite? • How are these articulated by and through, and intersected by, axes of gender, racialisation, national identity, sexualities, coloniality? • How might a Child as method perspective inform and enrich such analyses? According to Sabine (2013), the English title The Lives of Things references the 2006 film The Lives of Others (directed by Donnersmarck) which explored the hidden and insidious as well as overt dynamics of Stalinist dictatorship in everyday lives in the former German Democratic Republic. This recalls the Portuguese title, Objecto Quase, literally ‘almost object’, to invite speculation about what oppressive states do to people, as well as people’s exploitation and instrumentalisation of objects and environments. Sabine (2013) suggests that Saramago is addressing a (Portuguese) readership well attuned – in that turbulent postrevolutionary period – to reading between the lines to infer critique and invitations for political transformation. At any rate, this small volume exemplifies the liveliness of matter but also indicates profound attention to the complexities and varieties of human and more-than-human relations and entanglements, as well as the complexities of human gendered, classed, racialised and other institutional relations and arrangements. I suggest that Saramago’s engagement with these complexities both exemplifies and informs discussions of materialisms as well

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as provides an arena to reflect on the contribution of Child as method. Moreover, The Lives of Things illustrates Saramago’s commitment to matter as always ethico-political as well as material, and the impossibility of separating these. Campos (2018) demonstrates how Saramago’s particular version of magic realism expresses his Marxist historical materialist commitments: his plots dramatise conflict and contradiction and are driven by subordinate or subaltern people or parties: ‘This bottom-up deployment of power mirrors the emphasis on the material conditions of the characters as the basic constitutive elements of the plots’ (Campos, 2018, p. 68). Campos continues: the novels remain faithful to materialist dialectics insofar as they ensure consistency between events as they are described and the “realist” outcomes produced, whereby criticism of present real-world states of affairs is possible and implicit – this is the “realist” facet of Saramago’s literature. But from the standpoint of individual characters, there is room for thought experiments in the actual necessary observance of the laws of historical materialism, even without suspending the reader’s disbelief – this is the “non-naturalist” facet of Saramago’s literature. (Campos, 2018, p. 71) But, as Campos points out, this arises notwithstanding the non-alignment between material determinants and infrastructure, nor magical occurrences with superstructure, while equally magical determinants are not infrastructure, nor material occurrences superstructure: Instead, materialism is valid objectively and, with regard to individuals, it somehow incorporates their spiritual needs as both workers and sensible beings. . . . This reinterpretation of materialism as involving an ideal dimension lived out in the subjective coheres with the existence of objective laws insofar as it is shared by all the individuals that constitute the driving force of History. The characters’ spiritual experiences are unique to them and exceptions with regard to more general determinative laws; but this does not entail that the aptitude to experience them belongs solely to those particular characters, as if they were superhuman; rather, such experiences are illustrations of how each single individual develops a spiritual perspective inside (and with respect to) the objective material setting. (71–2) By ‘spiritual’ here, is meant some form of humanist idealism or commitment to redeeming qualities, demonstrated by actions, skills, and labour, as he puts it an ‘ideal dimension lived out in the subjective’ (71) but which is still objective since it is part of shared historical experience.

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Taking each story in turn . . . .

Having outlined these qualities identified in Saramago’s writing, I now move on to explore how they manifest in a reading of The Lives of Things (2012).

The Chair

The first story, ‘The Chair’, could be said to exhibit features of Perec’s infraordinary detailed analysis – describing the activity of Anobium coleoptera, or wood-eating beetles, chomping away. It is only late on that it becomes clear that the wood they are eating is part of a chair, and that the occupant of the chair is Salazar, the Portuguese fascist dictator, who did indeed eventually die from complications following a head injury sustained from falling off a chair at his summer house in Estoril in 1968. He fell and suffered a stroke after which he was unable to function, indeed was in a coma for some weeks, and died some two years later. While this did not spell the immediate end of the dictatorship (he was covertly replaced until his death by Marcelo Caetano), it certainly marked a decisive change and move towards the end. Saramago’s detailed description of the labour of the beetles, doing what they do to feed themselves, distances the reader from the human – as well as the political – realm. Some commentators see this move as ironic in intention (Costa, 2001). At any rate, Salazar is undone by the heedless actions of insects. They are, presumably, as unaware of his power as they are of his vulnerability. From the vantage point of my concerns in this chapter, it could be said that there is a kind of inhumanity about the narrative in its focus on the nonhuman, or more-than-human. We do not know the identity, let alone do we enter the subjectivity, of the man who is to fall from the rotten chair until late on in the short story, and the focus stays on the micro level: what is happening to the wooden leg of the chair through the activity of the beetles, how the material fabric of the wood weakens over time, how on this occasion when the body deposits its weight on it the wood fractures and eventually breaks and the body falls backwards, how the head hits the ground, how the impact is evident in a bruise to the head which slowly spreads as the effect of a haemorrhage, how the brain as a physical, biological organ responds to this injury etc. It is only at the end that the perspective pans back to the human level, so to speak, and the reader learns that servants and retainers who rush to help him find him unable to communicate etc. And that this leads to the demise of a very significant and hated figure. This is a historical accident in the most obvious, literal sense; albeit with major political consequences. But it also depicts the literal downfall of a dictator, a figure responsible for the oppression and exploitation of a nation (while other European states largely tolerated his actions – Estoril was a ‘neutral’ meeting point for Axis and Allied operatives during World War II).

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Saramago, as an avowed communist and later (more) libertarian socialist, can be seen as indicating his political stance in this decentred account of this particular human’s physical and psychological demise. If it is not actually overtly celebrating his death (and why not? Salazar was a fascist dictator), the narrative form imposes a level of analysis that withholds identification with him as a(nother) human in favour of (celebrating the labour of) the Anobium coleoptera. One message here, of course, is that we are all human and mortal, physical beings and will die. And indeed death is a major preoccupation of Saramago’s writings (including as a personified character in the titular Death with Interruptions, Saramago, 2005/2008). But the additional reading here is that this hated figure, who demonstrated such indifference to others, was finally undone by the small but significant (especially for him) actions of entities that were utterly indifferent to him or any other human. We are all subject to forces, small and big, that lie beyond us, of which a small material change or difference can dramatically shift the balance of power. If the human, and especially this human, is decentred in this account, still the wider geopolitical relations at play are noted. The man is described as falling, ‘with only one arm because he had left the other behind in Africa’ (17). This apparently minor reference is full of political significance, for Salazar’s dictatorship was tolerated by other European states, especially in maintaining Portugal a neutral country throughout World War II, and he even took a founding role in the formation of the major transnational organisations EFTA, GATT and NATO (he was an economist by academic training); nevertheless, he was out of step with other European states in resisting supporting decolonisation of previous colonial territories (notably, for Portugal, Guinea, Angola and Mozambique). So the ‘arm’ left in Africa is a reference to his determination to hold onto these territories, even at vast human and financial costs, and great bloodshed. Notably, it was the anticolonial rebellion in Guinea that galvanised the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. Hence, far from being empty or a reflection on Portuguese civilisational precepts, as the Portuguese colonial imaginary portrayed them to be, those former colonial territories were absolutely instrumental in liberating Portugal from the strong ‘arm’ of the dictatorship. Elsewhere Saramago explores in detail the continuing legacies of the ideological colonial underpinnings structuring Portuguese sensibility, in his alternative version and parallel narration surrounding The Siege of Lisbon (Saramago, 1989/1996; Sousa, 2000), and The Stone Craft (Saramago, 1986/1994) undermines Portuguese self-representation as ‘the prow’ (literally, since Saramago has the Iberian peninsula turn around so that Portugal is no longer ‘leading’ the way, Sabine, 2001). In ‘The Chair’ he merely hints that the ‘arm’ being left elsewhere may yet have rendered ‘the old man’ (as Saramago eventually characterises the body that will fall) more unstable, or with less means to cushion his fall and so prevent the

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injury to his head. He continues ‘And now that there is space, what space remains between the corner of the piece of furniture, the clenched fist, the lance in Africa, and the more fragile side of the head, the predestined bone?’ (18). Space here is the colonial space miniaturised into the body of ‘the old man’, placed within his skull, so that the ‘predestined bone’ will press into his brain on ‘the more fragile side of his head’ (18) and (eventually) kill him. Space, in the form of his political body, the man who usurped the body politic of Portugal for so many years, links the political actions of this man whose ‘clenched fist’ aggressively (but unsuccessfully) tries to suppress (with his ‘lance’) anticolonial uprisings in African territories. Space opens up the material possibility of change (‘now there is space’), and it is the eventual linking of those spaces (from the ‘corner of the piece of furniture’ to the ‘fragile side of the head’) that will also bring down the ‘clenched fist, the lance in Africa’. This materialism, then, focuses on historical contingency along with physical conditions; it is a global geopolitical drama. Is it ‘new’? No. The reader is taken to the narrative level of the busy beetles, and the molecular properties of the wood, if not quite to identify with these then to desubjectify the powerful leader, and his intentions or preoccupations. Indeed, commentators have noted the absence of interiority and especially character development within the stories in this collection. ‘The Chair’ is a powerful parable of the possibilities of unseating and overthrowing the oppressor. If the work of the beetles happens to serve human purposes, they are indifferent to these, inhabiting their own world at its own scale and temporality. The picture is both humbling and inspiring. Costa (2001, p. 40) suggests ‘in this soulless world it is easier for objects to gain consciousness and animation than it is for members of the degraded human society’. In its literary iconoclasm (depicting the downfall of a revered iconic political figure), it is also comic and tragic, and any (in my opinion justified) glee or malice at the particular political impacts of this event is put at a distance by virtue of how the narrative stays with the dispassionate perspective of the beetles and the leaking blood vessels. In a historical materialist sense, then, this was a momentous political event; a small moment arising from countless small earlier actions, that gave rise to a huge outcome. Perhaps it stands as a kind of ‘lightbulb’ moment, as when people say they knew where they were or what they were doing when Kennedy was assassinated, or the Twin Towers were taken down. But narratively, performatively, we have become, if not actors in, then witnesses to this event. In a Karen Baradian, new materialist sense, the intra-actions and entanglements are clearly vital (as well as in this case deadly) in producing the outcome (Barad, 2007); but the material action is not at the macropolitical scale, albeit that it eventually contributes to and is a precursor to such major political effects. The ‘things’ here are of course the chair, the wood that breaks, the beetles that chew the wood, and the man who turned

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people into things; who in the end is a thing himself too, a material, corporeal entity that can fall, disintegrate, break and die. Yet the thingification perhaps has other performative effects. I  recall how my colleague, Angel Gordo López, when he was attempting to teach me Spanish in the 1980s, kept using grammatical variations of the sentence ‘I was playing my guitar when Franco died’. ‘Embargo’

If ‘The Chair’ names the separate but parallel lives of humans and things (even if the beetles are sometimes hailed by commentators as revolutionary heroes, e.g. Costa, 2001), the second Saramago story in The Lives of Things, ‘Embargo’, effects deeper and more conscious entanglements; conscious in the sense of being portrayed as subjectively experienced by the human protagonist but also in the sense of attributing some kind of wilful (and it seems malign) agency to the car he is driving. This car is a thing the man is proud of, but it has to be parked at a distance from his house because of other people’s cars, and is used to do various rounds or deliveries as part of his job. But rather than using the car, the man finds he is being driven by the car in the sense that the car overrides or ignores his steering, braking, and use of the gears. It stops suddenly and starts for no apparent reason. The story is set in a political moment when there is a petrol shortage (recalling the oil embargo of the 1970s), such that the man is worried about running out of petrol, and the car drives him to wait in queues to top up on petrol even when he tries to drive past the petrol stations because the petrol tank is already nearly completely full and he is worried about being late for his commitments. Eventually the car will not stop or let him out. He finds himself physically enmeshed within or attached to the car, trapped in his own vehicle, shackled to and by his own artefact, instrument or prosthesis. In ‘Embargo’, the narrative focuses on the man’s responses, reactions, thoughts, and calculations; starting from how he crept out of bed leaving his wife sleeping that morning to how he will explain to her what is happening and how he has not yet come home, and his panic and terror and longing for her to be there to rescue and comfort him. In this sense, the story is deeply human, concerned with the man’s perplexity, shock at being out of control, of being trapped in his car, indeed being stuck to or even somehow absorbed into the car. But it is also a depiction of an object turning the ‘owner’ into the owned, the driver into the driven, a reversal of roles and relations of dependency; a kind of cautionary tale, perhaps, about not taking our possessions for granted. But it is also an interrogation of urban life in industrialised societies and our dependence on material (and environmentally toxic, carbon guzzling and also deadly to human, animal and vegetable life) objects. We use cars as instruments, to do our jobs and conduct our lives. Yet it remains unclear

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what the car ‘wants’, or ‘why’ it is doing this, beyond assertion of control over the man rather than vice versa. ‘Embargo’ is both a noun and a verb. Its first dictionary definition concerns the official banning of trade or commercial activity between countries, and what comes first to mind in reading the story is the Arab oil embargos of the 1970s, which did indeed limit petrol supplies and generate anxiety about fuel availability. A  more archaic meaning (as a verb) is to seize (e.g. ships or goods by the state), which also brings bigger political players into focus. Here, the car seizes the man and drives him. He is abducted and only released when thoroughly defeated, humiliated and abjected, taken far from himself and his familiar (urban) surroundings, even reminded of and rendered into thing status himself (perhaps, as citizens in fossil fuel dependent economies we are forced into particular political positions). Indeed, by the end it is unclear whether the man is still alive (some accounts presume he is dead, Costa, 2001). At any rate, the reader is invited to reconsider their relations of instrumentality with material objects as well as their own embodied material engagements with them. Long before popular cultural depictions of cyborgs or humanoid servants acquiring sentience and resisting human servitude that now populate our screens, Saramago is critiquing the ecological and instrumental consequences of modern consumer capitalism. The geopolitical context of the oil embargo, a cross-national political context, a policy affecting the daily lives of many citizens but enacted by and between state parties and regional power blocs, has shifted to become the car’s embargo, or blockade or seizure, of the man. There are a number of different interpretations at play: the prosthesis asserts its agency over its host, and the geopolitics of refusal and withholding are materialised at a smaller scale in the car’s alternating stoppages, strikes, and supply concerns. While Hilal’s (2021) discussion of this story focuses on the techno-human hybrid relation set up with the car, ‘Embargo’ can be read as an ecological critique (of our dependence on fossil fuels and individually owned cars). It also invites being read as an invitation to engage with the geopolitics of transnational trade relations (such as those surrounding oil and gas), that is, as matters of direct, personal concern as in whether we have to queue at petrol stations and pay more. And while it does not exactly ‘sympathise’ with the car, or anthropomorphise it (the action is focused on what happens to the man, the putative husband, worker, and driver), it certainly asserts the agency of the object which directly challenges or thwarts those of the mansubject in wilful, resistant, if not malevolent then certainly damaging ways. In trying to thwart the control being exercised by the car, the man drives the car on, still bodily fused with it, until the car runs out of petrol, and he eventually ‘slumps’ out of the car ‘either because he was dying or the engine had gone dead’ (44), Saramago writes. His fate and the car’s have become one, so when one dies so does the other, it seems. Through the unaccounted-for

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actions of the car, we are forced to confront our own blockages and impediments. Objects are of course subject to our own arbitrary whims and (ab) uses, that are both personal and apparently impersonal (as in economic forces, or ‘the market’). There can be no doubt that cars occupy a particular place within gendered cultural imaginaries, carrying both status and sexualised and gendered significations, likely also with specific national identifications (cf. Heiber et al., 2008; Lijarcio et al., 2015). The question is posed: should we really be so ‘attached’ to such objects? Hilal (2021, pp. 297–298) ponders the ending: The death of the man at the end of the novel does not create feelings of defeat or victory for the man and the car respectively. Is it a real death or a death of his ego? It may be the death of the human being who separates him/herself from nature, considers him/herself as superior to the nonhuman and blindly obeys the enslavement of oppression.  .  .  .The allegorical death of the man in the story eventually creates a new moment of enlightenment. ‘Reflux’

The third story, ‘Reflux’, offers a further consideration of the interpenetration of (rather than binary between) life and death, and the futility of trying to expunge one from the other. The narrative form is of a fairy or folk tale, and the setting is a state where the autocratic King fears death and so wants to avoid all associations with it such as funerals and mourning rites. So he decides to build – or, rather, have his subjects build (Saramago is always attentive to questions of labour and the conditions of workers) – a huge cemetery to house, and rehouse, all the dead. This involves digging up all the graves in smaller, distributed cemeteries, and then even those who were not buried in cemeteries but in gardens or woods. Characteristically, Saramago highlights the massive consequences for ordinary people of this extraordinary, arbitrary decision, ranging from the suffering caused by the high taxes levied to pay for this (applied to the citizenry in inverse proportion to age, that is, with the oldest paying the most), to the lives lost in constructing the very high, tapering walls. Once completed, at enormous expense and great sacrifice on the part of the people, this bizarre project is also shown to have paradoxical effects. Perhaps recalling how war benefits national economies and the wider dynamics of disaster capitalism, the King’s folly is shown to give rise to a huge boom in the demand for transport, building materials and labour, as well as producing a trickle of little shops servicing the workers that eventually become whole cities surrounding this central city of the dead. Clearly this is an irrational project, as the dead outnumber the living, or will eventually in any given society. Notably,

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Saramago highlights the absurdity of the efforts involved, including how the scientists are put to work to find buried remains, and how their invention cannot distinguish between human and nonhuman. Here too the human/ nonhuman binary turns out to be both permeable and arbitrary. For when the King understood the danger he had escaped, he had the shivers: in fact, all death is death, even the non-humankind, and there could be no purpose in removing dead men from sight, when dogs and, horses and birds go on dropping before our eyes. And all other creatures, with the possible exception of insects which are only half-animal (as was firmly believed by the nation’s scientists at that time). (53) Here, the nonhuman or transhuman ‘forces’ of economy and daily practicalities are shown in themselves to work to undo the strict spatial separation made between the living and the dead, and in the end, cities spring up around and even within the central cemetery, literally centralising it rather than separating from it. And when the King himself realises he is near death, in fact he too comes to appreciate the error of his capricious decision and indicates his wish to be buried under a tree. The notion of reflux suggests some kind of medical or chemical process of reversal of direction or process. It connotes the return of something unwanted associated with a biological, perhaps especially alimentary, process (acid reflux causes gastrointestinal discomfort). It is not a human-centred process, even if some processes do involve (and sometimes cause pain to) human bodies. The King’s demand to expunge his contact with death is of course impossible, but Saramago runs with the scenario to show its political-economic ramifications (and fortifications) and ultimately how it undoes itself, even in a context where the King’s rule remains uncontested. Power unravels itself. Without a trace of explicit criticism or evaluation – for, as ever, Saramago stays with a close description of the processes – the body politic of the rule of the King-as-head-of-nation is implicitly put in question. (I think here of Laurent Binet’s (2012) depiction in HHhH of the bodies in mass graves at Baba Yar bubbling and regurgitating in a kind of reflux where the ground itself is revolting, rejecting and exposing the crimes it has been made to cover over.) ‘Things’

If there is no hint of citizen resistance or questioning of ruling class ideas in ‘Reflux’, this is topicalised explicitly in the fourth story, entitled ‘Things’. This opens with the protagonist, a civil servant, getting treatment at his workplace for a scrape he received from a door apparently accidentally closed on his hand. This seems to be only one of several strange happenings, including

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stairs going missing, crockery being absent from cupboards, televisions misbehaving, and then doors, walls and eventually whole houses disappearing. The focus is on the civil servant’s work and his desire for a fitted carpet for his apartment, for material things that he would like. He is a minor bureaucrat administering applications for objects, access to which is structured according to the status of the applicant. The first such request described is for a piano (surely that most bourgeois of possessions) from a man whose ‘C’ status means he will get it quickly, notwithstanding scarce availability, whereas it seems the civil servant has little hope of getting the carpet he wants for his apartment unless he finds some means for rapid promotion from ‘G’ status upwards. Depicted here is a world of consumption and individualist aspiration, therefore, a bit like Perec’s Les Choses, but now more explicitly so, as people are graded by letters of the alphabet. In Saramago’s story, it seems that the objects themselves are rebelling or exercising some kind of refusal, even if no explicit demands or manifestos are being issued by them. The escalation from small disruptions is accompanied by increasing demands from ‘the Government’ for citizen compliance and observance of hierarchy and identification of status. Eventually, it becomes clear that the disappearing buildings are leaving the former occupants dead and naked on the ground. Saramago is always attentive to diverse human responses to the various crises he depicts, indeed this is perhaps the core theme spanning his very diverse works: to explore how forms of practice both reveal subjectivity and produce new objectivities through engagement in changing material conditions. The civil servant is a compliant, even complacent, subject. He (and Saramago’s human protagonists in these – as other of his – stories are often men whose intersecting classed and gendered habits and preoccupations are thereby rendered available for critique) is portrayed as having faith in the Government and its increasingly wild claims that it will punish the objects or rebels, or whatever they are (for no one knows). He is keen to report any dissenting views, notably expressed by people he encounters of ‘lower’ categories than himself – also hoping doing this will accelerate his promotion. He is portrayed as alone, a single man, without close relationships with others, or indeed concerns for particular others. He tries to save himself and then finds that others, like him, have had the idea of going to the outskirts of the city to watch the bombardment promised by the Government supposedly to deal with the problem. He comes upon a group of naked people who lack not only clothes but also the biometric symbol on their hands indicating social status, and this is where Saramago goes beyond his allegorical or parable form to become explicitly didactic. For their claim, in the final words of the story, which speak in their voice, is that a society where people have been made into things cannot easily be reformed or rebuilt. Humans and nonhumans have been accorded the same status, or perhaps these nongraded beings are objects that have now assumed human form. Rather than call to restore humanity to

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the humans – and so put the objects, the goods, the products, possessions and commodities back in their place as things to be owned, exchanged and used, Saramago suggests there is more going on than this. What remains unspecified in ‘Things’ is the nature of the relationship between the human rebels, therefore, and the more-than or non-human. Indeed, the human rebels (if that is what they are) appear only very late on (notwithstanding the Government’s assumption that some terrorist group is responsible). Instead, the focus is on what is happening to the material culture of urban capitalist life, which appears to be frustrating usual human practice. This context allows for the exploration of relationships with objects, their meanings, how they structure human lives, whether in their presence or absence, as well as their style. As actor network theorists have famously pointed out (e.g. Callon  & Law, 1997), doors and doorframes and stairs of our houses organise living and work arrangements, and support bodies. Saramago takes this further to ask: what if our bed suddenly collapsed or imploded, or the blankets ‘decided’ to fold in on us? Human material lives depend on other material objects, but we are not only also users of objects but are also objectified too. An example from Gieryn (2002) is indicative: Buildings insist on the particular paths that our bodies move along every day, and the predictable convergence or divergence of these paths with those of others is (in a sense) what we mean by structured social relations. . . .Put simply: buildings emplace sociations and practices. Buildings also conceal their makings (and their purposes) through the discourses by which people customarily apprehend them. (61) The door scraping or hurting the civil servant suggests some kind of intentionality or agentic powers, even if he initially attributes it to his own carelessness or an accident. Is it the object’s resistance? We do not gain a clear answer. Yet this particular injury also works narratively to render attention to the civil servant’s own object status in obscuring the functionality of his own signifier of status which, in this society, is inscribed biometrically on the hand. The human rebellion against this unequal society may leave open how the objects are involved in this struggle, but it seems that Saramago still invests them with some capacities to refuse to support (in literal ways) this oppressive society. ‘The Centaur’

The fifth chapter of The Lives of Things deals with a fabulous human hybrid of the kind that occupies much folklore. It focuses on the divided subjectivity as well as the combined body of the centaur, a half-man, half-horse creature.

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It offers a sensitive exploration of the subjective struggle the centaur experiences in appetites and bodily sensations through his combined or conjoint body, as well as his (unwelcoming) relations with human society. Saramago portrays the centaur, the last of his kind, as a conflicted subject, always torn between his human and beastly bodily needs and wants, rarely comfortable in this conjoint body: the horse wants to drink, but the man does not feel thirst; finding a position that both horse and man can lie in to sleep is difficult; the man needs to dream but the horse does not, and more. This is a tragic, touching story of exile, flight and persecution, as well as a parable of human beastliness and complex speculative interrogation of transcorporeality. Only in its violent death does the centaur find himself only man, but this is where he has been violently severed from his horse torso and limbs. This last of his kind, ancient and noble, who is said also to be the last of all mythic, fabulous creatures on earth, has been driven out, hunted, and forced into death. What does this say about humanity? Saramago issues a searing critique of human destruction and intolerance of difference, even as the woman on whose behalf the men legitimise their hunt for the centaur (so recalling the lynching of Black men in the American South in the name of ‘protecting’ white women) recognises and honours – and even desires – the centaur. ‘Revenge’

If ‘The Centaur’ ultimately depicts a victim of human cruelty, the final story ‘Revenge’ (in Portuguese ‘Desforra’, which could also be translated as revenge, vengeance, retribution, retaliation, avengement, including the sense of reparation for an affront or recuperation of what has been lost) takes this a stage further in engaging complex human, and especially young humans’, responses to animal (mis)treatment. The protagonists here are a boy and a girl, portrayed in a rural, seemingly riverside, environment. No description is offered of interior states, but rather the narrative focuses on actions. This is the only story in the collection that primarily concerns children or young adults (the ‘boy’ is described as just beginning to have chest hair). While the primary protagonist is the boy, it seems both boy and girl are oriented to each other, attracted from afar. The boy arrives back at his homestead and witnesses the castration of a pig (a spectacle that makes the woman present go pale), and the pig is then made by the men to eat its own testicles, a grotesque, bloody and ugly ritual of humiliation as well as self-cannibalisation that appears to confirm and even justify its own subservient status as a stupid, lowly beast. The boy sees this and the adults (two men and a woman) are aware that the boy has seen this. Saramago writes that they seem embarrassed in recognising that the boy has witnessed the scene. The boy goes inside the house and drinks some water, and then returns to the riverside

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seemingly preoccupied, but gaining some relief from the tranquillity of the water, until he catches sight of the girl again and then ‘silent and unexpected, a blue streak passed over the water’ (142). The story finishes with the boy stripping off his clothes and making his way through the water towards the girl who has similarly taken off her clothes in his sight. Costa (2001, p. 42) comments on both the contrasting, lyrical prose style in which this story is narrated, suggestive of the bucolic setting, but also how Saramago maintains his decentring of subjectivity such that humans and nonhumans are accorded equivalent narrative emphasis: the frog that observes everything and the pig that chews his own testicles after being castrated hold as much importance in the development of the action as the adolescent who avenges the animal, advancing toward the water to enjoy his first sexual experience with a girl hiding in the grove across the brook. If Costa’s gloss possibly overstates or too swiftly consolidates the story’s interpretation, it is certainly a very strange and violent story, whose flattened subjectivities (of the human actors at least) combine with the apparently unrelated or simple sequence of events to draw attention to our own meaning-making inferential processes as readers, to try to make sense of the enigma. The few commentaries I have been able to find on this story note some alignment with Saramago’s own childhood, and his memoir (discussed earlier) opens with reminisces of idyllic bright river scenes that involve similar actions (of carrying oars), a similar atmosphere of languid sensuality and merging of water and skin. In As Pequenas Memórias/Small memories (Saramago, 2006/2011), there is also an account of an early sexual experience with a girl involving crossing a river (by boat), as well as several stories involving herding and looking after pigs. The story is enigmatic; as noted, the narrative avoids exploration of the interior and affective states, but at the very least there is an alignment of response to the reproductive control of both animal and human young. The boy’s sensuous immersion in his surroundings is interrupted by the pig’s cries, which ‘now wounded and outraged, deafened him. Other cries followed, piercing, wrathful, a desperate plea, a cry expecting no help’ (140). He is sensitive to its suffering and, while his emotional response is unspecified, he is described as drinking water and almost dousing himself in it as if to cleanse himself or recover from a shock. The return to the river appears to restore some bodily connection to nature that may heal him from what he has seen, but finally, it is the desire for the girl that distracts him from his preoccupation or distress: ‘His nakedness was slowly revealed. As if he was healing his own blindness’ (142). (As already noted, blindness and seeing are key concerns for Saramago, indeed the titles of other of his books, which clearly work

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as metaphors of – and critiques of dominant forms of – enlightenment and rationality – in their organised, institutional as well as individual versions). If the boy is asserting some solidarity with or vindication of the castrated pig in acting on his emerging desires (when he first catches sight of the girl ‘The boy raised his free hand and his entire body traced out some inaudible word’ (139–140)), he is also thereby highlighting the privilege of his human status, even as he transcends traditionally attributed childhood characteristics by becoming sexually active. The theme of thwarted sexuality is what links the events narrated, and ‘revenge’ is really only suggested because of the story’s title. From a Child as method perspective, a puzzle is set in play that traces and interrogates symmetries and asymmetries of human, child and animal relations, and inter-relations. Girl and boy are exploring their own animal, physical desires alongside exercising and experiencing new bodily sensations of a form that will precisely be denied to the pig. The scene that the boy has witnessed may well be a daily occurrence in animal husbandry and likely was to the young Saramago (since he herded pigs as a child, and describes cleaning out the stye of those selected to be fattened up, who are likely also to have been castrated). Saramago’s account in its imaginative, speculative form goes beyond social science depictions of animal agency (e.g. Law & Mol, 2008), even as it ‘risks’ anthropomorphism. While the debate about ‘neutering’ domestic ‘pets’, especially in advanced urban societies appears largely settled (see Chen, 2012), castrating piglets is still routinely done supposedly to reduce their aggression and ‘mounting behaviour’ (sexual behaviour) as well as (and this appears to be the primary ‘reason’) to prevent ‘boar taint’, a supposedly unpleasant odour and taste affecting the pork meat; indeed, online sources suggest that meat markets do not accept ‘entire’ (i.e. uncastrated) pig carcasses. While debate rages on the animal welfare considerations posed by the castration of pigs (as well as other animals), notwithstanding EC directives to abandon surgical castration of pigs by 2018 (The Pig Site, https://www.thepigsite.com/articles/boar-taintand-the-castration-debate, 2019), there appears to be little movement against the process, on consumer aesthetic grounds (i.e. for the taste of the meat). Returning to Saramago’s story, further (dis)connections between the management of child and animal sexuality are suggested. If sex and violence are aligned here, it is because the adults have made it so, for prior to the castration of the pig a miasma of erotic languor infuses the text. The boy and girl who strip off their clothes in front of each other across the river, before the boy plunges into the water to join her, appear to be about to engage in recreational sex, which is a form of resistance to reproductive futurism, the position Lee Edelman (2004) and other queer theorists have highlighted as the instrumentalised function of the bearing or ‘having’ of children in confirming and maintaining heterosexed societies, and associated narratives of capitalist progress. Aside from the marking of gendered as well as youth

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status, the boy and girl are not positioned within specific familial networks or orders. (We are given no clue how the boy is related to the men and the woman, for example.) Rather, these networks are implied by their spatial proximity. The young people are portrayed as generationally as well as spatially separated from the adults, while – it seems – their childhood, or at least not-yet-adult status, is also indicated by their not joining the adults in their productive occupations; or else the boy is undertaking different productive activity in returning from his boat trip (fishing perhaps), though this is not indicated. They live still (for there is an air of nostalgia infusing the early part of the narrative) in a realm of play or non (or less) productive activity. Saramago appears to activate and mobilise these conventional features associated with childhood and put them to different ends in a denouement that suggests a transition or separation being generated by the emerging relationship between the young people that will make them different from their elders. I dwell on these examples as they offer key resources of texts exploring human–nonhuman relations that certainly acknowledge the various inhumanities by which so-called humanity is structured, as well as affording to the nonhuman or more-than-human domain major agency. Political-economic forces are shown to determine – partially but not absolutely – the subjective relationships and identifications set in play. Child as method and The Lives of Things: absent presences

By contrast to Perec, Saramago’s texts are more obviously situated within generational orders and relations, as well as addressing navigations and enactments of age and heteropatriarchal relations. Yet despite the focus in A Caverna/The Cave (2000/2002) on the affections and loyalties of the father– daughter relationship, neither author has a great deal to say about chronological children. As discussed in Chapter 9, Perec’s W is an example of how imagined (lost and lacking) parental relations are materially structured in psychic, embodied and textual life, with his life’s project organised around and devoted to exploring its impacts, even if by the end of his analysis with Pontalis he felt himself to be somewhat freer from its melancholic ruminations, and prepared to father his own children. Saramago appears somewhat subjectively freer to explore these issues more widely. As already noted, ‘Revenge’/‘Desforra’ is the only story in The Lives of Things that explicitly topicalises children, in gendered and implicitly generational terms. However, Child as method is not only concerned with where and how children are cited, constructed or characterised. This is an important methodological and political point, for, given their conventional affective and relational significance, the absence as well as presence of children in these literary productions communicates important meanings. I have already highlighted Saramago’s focus on middle-aged, middle-class male protagonists

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whose often singular, unattached status works to emphasise their isolated and alienated positioning (as in the civil servant in his short story ‘Things’). But if child and children seem not to populate The Lives of Things, closer inspection reveals slight and passing references whose presumed or indicative status is worthy of interrogation. While ‘The Chair’ concerns the demise of ‘the old man’, a figure at the opposite end of chronological and generational relations, ‘children’ appear in the narrator’s lament at the lack of photographic record of the fall, unlike the more typical pictorial keepsakes of our daily lives, ‘. . . a photograph of our children, our membership card . . .’ (15). The sole mention of children in ‘The Centaur’ similarly evokes gendered and generational relations of care and pedagogy, where ‘Mothers handed him [the Centaur] their children to lift into mid-air that they might lose any fear of heights’ (120–121). Implied here is the assumption of the centaur’s harmlessness and valued social status, since clearly for a mother to entrust her child to the arms of this half-man, half-horse creature she must construct him as safe and benign. Parental categories and roles are thus naturalised along with the attributed nature of the centaur. In ‘Embargo’, two ‘boys’ are mentioned: the first appears early on as the man leaves his house to retrieve his parked car and sees a boy ‘spitting on a dead rat in the gutter as he had been taught to do’ (28), so underscoring the conventionality of human practices of disregard or distain for nonhuman remains. The second boy appears later in the story, enlisted by the trapped driver parked near his house to go up to his apartment and inform his wife that he is stuck in the car and to call for help. Unfortunately, the man is overcome with embarrassment at the humiliation of his situation and instead drives off to try to find some less public space, leaving his wife to come down and find him gone. The boy here is an intermediary, literally a messenger, who makes no further contribution to the plot. ‘Reflux’ contains two references to children, the first as part of the ritual performance or supposedly benign, securitised rule, as where the King would visit his domains, to caress little children selected by protocol beforehand, to receive bouquets of flowers already inspected by the secret police in case they might have poison or a bomb concealed inside, to cut ribbons in fast, non-toxic colours. (48) Here, children greeting the monarch signify a widely recognisable enactment of acquiescence to and celebration of state power via generational orders, confirming the naturalness of paternal authority of King over subject citizen. The second reference similarly signifies a banality of everyday life, the need for ‘children’s schools’ as an index of the ways ordinary everyday life is creeping inside the cemetery.

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In ‘Things’, canonical positions of children are also set in play which trace the dawning awareness on the part of adults of the severity of the situation, as where the debris caused by the revolt of the objects is portrayed as resembling the ‘mess’ or disorder left by children, and in the newspaper image of things disappearing: ‘the picture showed the labyrinth of a long strip broken up into rectangular spaces, as in children’s games’ (88). The reference to the children’s games appears to work to domesticate, even minimise the disaster. Similarly, as the civil servant decides to leave his apartment and take to the streets as a safer environment, he notes: The streets did not appear to have suffered much damage, but there was a general air of neglect throughout the city, as if someone had been going around throwing bits and pieces here and there, like children dropping cake-crumbs; at first, you scarcely notice the mess, then it becomes clear the cake is no longer in a fit state to be served to guests. (90) Finally, children appear as minor nuisances, as cyphers or parodies of adult compliance to the authoritarian regime (Mocidade Portuguesa comes to mind), who then move on to ridicule it. Their impertinence can only be excused (or rendered ‘harmless’) on the part of the offended adults by recourse to reasserting the position of the children as themselves static, nonagentic products or duplicates of their parents: This also became a favourite game for children: they pounced on the adults like wild beasts, pulled faces, shouting: “Show me your hand!” And if the exasperated adult after giving in, demanded to inspect theirs, the children would refuse, stick out a tongue, or show their hands from a distance. Never mind, they were harmless: and the letter on their palms was exactly the same as that of their parents. (95) But there is one further, more ambiguous, child-related reference in ‘Things’ that merits attention. At a key moment in the civil servant’s experience of the escalation of strange occurrences, having returned to his apartment he turns on the TV to find only the test card image being screened. And at that very moment the test card vanished and suddenly there appeared a child’s face with eyes wide open. It receded into the background, far back into the remote distance until it became a simple luminous dot, quivering in the centre of the black screen. Next minute the test card reappeared, slightly tremulous, undulating, like an image reflected in water. (78)

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The child, typically rendered as the prototypical human subject as so often seen in humanitarian aid and disaster imagery, here seems to work in multiple and contrasting directions. Is the child-subject being eclipsed (by the increasingly animate TV)? Or does the appearance of the child herald the inauguration of some other transformation of subject and matter? ‘Wide open eyes’ (as the infancy research studies tell us) could be read as surprise or fear, as well as innocence. We are offered no further indication of the alignment of the child (given its conventional liminal status between human and nonhuman, as an index of either a warrant for the civilisational exercise of authority or a nostalgic trace of life before alienating industrial labour regimes). At any rate, this is a much more disturbing image, prompting the civil servant to telephone to check if there is some kind of fault in the TV transmission network, which is denied. The disembodied child who recedes into a dot, then, seems to signal his increasing unease, the scaling up of anxiety, an expression of the insignificance of mere individuals, alongside the continuing indifference of prevailing authorities and institutions to the seismic happenings in ordinary people’s lives. This moment stands out as prophetic and transformative, if quickly passed over. The vanishing child, or child as (anamorphotic) vanishing point, is suggested here as alternatively the essence, limit or boundary of subjecthood. Especially noteworthy is its visually mediated status and manipulation by technological means. This dissolution or retraction/withdrawal or even absorption of the child into a ‘simple luminous dot, quivering in the centre of the black screen’ (78) perhaps best expresses the complex and unstable semiotic geopolitics that Child as method brings to the analysis of potent imbrications engendered by both the presence, and absent presence, of children/ childhood. Having, in this chapter and its predecessor, engaged with Perec and Saramago’s texts as indicative resources for a geomaterialist Child as method analysis, the next and final chapter returns to debates about materialism, its varieties and relevance. References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bellos, D. (2010). Georges Perec: A life in words. Random House. Binet, L. (2012). HHhH. Grasset & Fasquell. Callon, M., & Law, J. (1997). After the individual in society: Lessons on collectivity from science, technology and society. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 22(2), 165–182. Campos, A. S. (2018). José Saramago’s “magical” historical materialism. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 61–80). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

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Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press. Costa, H. (2001). Saramago’s construction of fictional characters: From Tera do Pecado to Baltasar and Blimunda. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 6, 34–48. Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press. Ferreira, A. P. (2018). Saramago’s axiology of gender difference. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 163–192). Springer. Giannopoulou, Z. (2014). Prisoners of Plot in José Saramago’s The Cave. Philosophy and Literature, 38(2), 332–349. Gieryn, T. F. (2002). What buildings do. Theory and Society, 31(1), 35–74. Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Haraway, D. J. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness: Prickly Paradigm Press. Heiber, R. F., Moral, B., Pecharromán, B., & Gordo López, Á. J. (2008). Siniestralidad vial y subjetivación: el coche en la gestión global de la vida y la muerte. Cultura Digital, 3, 73–97. https://www.cnae.com/ficheros/files/prensa/estudios/ estudio1.pdf Hilal, K. (2021). The car as a thing: Latife Tekin’s swords of ice and José Saramago’s “Embargo”. HUMANITAS-Uluslararası Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 9(17), 287–300. Jenkins, D. (2018). Traumatic counterfactuals. In C. Salzani  & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 211–233). Springer. Law, J., & Mol, A. (2008). The actor-enacted: Cumbrian sheep in 2001. In C. Knappett,  & L. Malafouris (Eds.), Material agency: Towards a non-anthropocentric approach (pp. 57–77). Springer. Lijarcio, I., Gordo López, Á. J., Llamazares, J., & Garcés, M. (2015). Análisis internacional sobre la multi-reincidencia vial en conductores. Programas y medidas., working paper, Complutense Universidad de Madrid. https://www.cnae.com/fiche ros/files/prensa/estudios/estudio1.pdf Menditto, G. (2018). Some remarks on a phenomenological interpretation of Saramago’s Cave. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 81–100). Springer. Sabine, M. (2013, January 7). Review: The lives of things, ceasefire. https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/books-review-the-lives-of-things/ Sabine, M. (2016). José Saramago: History, utopia, and the necessity of error. Legenda. Sabine, M. J. (2001). Form and ideology in the novels of Jose Saramago, 1980–1989. The University of Manchester. Salzani, C. (2018). Correcting history: Apocalypticism, Messianism and Saramago’s philosophy of history. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 19–37). Springer. Salzani, C., & Vanhoutte, K. K. (2018a). Introduction: Proteus the philosopher, or reading Saramago as a lover of wisdom. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 1–18). Springer. Salzani, C., & Vanhoutte, K. K. (2018b). Saramago’s dogs: For an inclusive humanism. In C. Salzani  & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 193–210). Springer.

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Santiago, C. C. (2018). Female representations in José Saramago: A space for oppositional discourses from the Canonical Gospels to The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 143–162). Springer. Saramago, J. (1978/2012). Objecto Quase/The lives of things (G. Pontiero, Trans.). Verso. Saramago, J. (1982/1987). Memorial do Convento/Baltasar and Blimunda. Mariner Books. Saramago, J. (1986/1994). A Jangada de Pedra [The stone raft]. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brace. Saramago, J. (1989/1996). História do Cerco de Lisboa [History of the siege of Lisbon]. Harcourt Brace Saramago, J. (1991/1993). O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo [The gospel according to Jesus Christ]. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brace. Saramago, J. (1995/1997). Ensaio sobre a Cegueira/Blindness Vintage. Saramago, J. (1997/1999). Todos os Nomes [All the names]. Harvest. Saramago, J. (2000/2002). A Caverna [The cave]. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brace. Saramago, J. (2004/2006). Ensaio sobre a Lucidez/Seeing. Vintage. Saramago, J. (2005/2008). As Intermitências da Morte/Death with interruptions. Mariner Books. Saramago, J. (2006/2011). As Pequenas Memórias [Small memories] (M. J. Costa, Trans.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brace. Saramago, J. (2008/2010). A Viagem do Elefante [The elephant’s journey]. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brace. Sousa, R. W. (2000). José Saramago ‘revises’, or out of Africa and into cyber-history. Discourse, 22(3), 73–86.

11 MATERIALISMS Neither new nor ‘silly’

My reading of these works by Perec and Saramago suggests that they help show how false the opposition is between old and new materialisms. In their different ways, and notwithstanding their different (albeit both socialist or left) political affiliations, as well as different but overlapping contexts, both explore the subjective domain as constituted and framed by the political economic conditions. Both authors subscribed to forms of historical materialism and drew on this to interrogate modes of psychic life and how this reflects and responds to social and structural conditions. Perec was deeply engaged in literature considering the impacts of Nazism, including the concentration and extermination camps as spaces where humans were literally reduced to dead matter, and conditions supporting or enabling such processes of degradation and dehumanisation, as well as the inhumanity of state-imposed terror and state-engineered industrial-scale bureaucratised genocide. Saramago’s various and diverse writings record, interrogate and critique Portuguese nationalism and the colonialist imaginary, from the twelfth-century siege of Lisbon as the frontline of Christian crusades against Arabs, to the eighteenth-century feudal Catholic state and the labour of the poor to transport and build a monastery at the whim of the King, through to twentieth-century peri-urban, Portugal. In A Viagem do Elefante/The Elephant (2008/2010) he explores intersections between global and interpersonal dynamics of empire giving rise to the tortuous transnational journey of an Indian elephant and his caretaker from Portugal to Austria, as a gift consolidating transnational alliances between ruling dynasties. For both authors, there is no division between base and superstructure, and also in both corpora (though more expressively so in Saramago’s), there is clear engagement in the liveliness of matter as well DOI: 10.4324/9781003284031-15

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as its exploitation and the costs to humans and nonhumans alike of its instrumentalisation. That is, both authors offer plenty of examples that demonstrate longstanding and sustained materialist analysis that, I suggest, offer insights for more-than-human analyses. If, in Les Choses (Perec, 1965), Perec highlights the emptiness of things, he nevertheless invests them with notable qualities and affective entanglements in Species of Spaces (Perec, 1999). Where Perec focuses on how things, artefacts, architecture, and ‘taste’, structure and stratify human relations and has rather less to say about the animal world (although he is known to have loved cats), Saramago could be said to accord objects more extensive agentic capacities that lie outside or beyond commodity fetishism, and (perhaps, unsurprisingly given he was writing more recently than Perec) invites a more eco-sensitive sensibility that blends objects, animals and humans and tries to envisage, or retrieve the possibility of more continuity and connection between human and nonhuman (boy, frog, pig, water . . .). Animals

Pedersen (2011) opens her prescient discussion of the relations between critical animal studies and posthuman debates with an example from Saramago’s writing. Despite Saramago’s different approach to the death of humans and animals (evident in both Death with interruptions (Saramago, 2005/2008) and the story ‘Reflux’ in the collection, Objecto Quase/The Lives of Things discussed in Chapter 10 (Saramago, 1978/2012)), Pedersen offers a reading of his work in support of the need for posthuman and critical animal studies to forge a critical posthumanist approach to human–animal relations. Far from collapsing or merging the two fields, she juxtaposes key ‘edges’ connecting them. Reviewing the literature, she points out that, notwithstanding the presumed alignments and connections between posthumanist and critical animal studies perspectives, a revised or renewed humanism might work just as well: while critical animal studies aligns with posthumanist critiques of the idea of human supremacy and its disastrous implications for nonhuman animals, a differently articulated and differently performed humanism with a commitment to end animal exploitation and objectification, and with profoundly non-speciesist relationalities at its core, could, at least in theory, do a similar (although, as we shall see, not identical) job. (Pedersen, 2011, p. 69) This important point perhaps also invites the question of why more recent debates are so quick to jettison the human. On the way to arriving at hybrid, surprising and engaged alliances and forms of mobilisation across and

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between posthumanist and critical animal studies, Pedersen also discusses Carmen Dell’Aversano’s (2010) critical engagement with Edelman’s (2004) analysis of reproductive futurism installed by the figure of the child, exploring how this juxtaposes with critical animal studies. In so doing, they bring queer theory into dialogue with critical animal studies, connecting and contrasting the position of the child with animals in both social and biological reproductive politics: The (companion) animal is therefore not to be viewed as a substitute for “the Child” in a conventional nuclear family constellation; rather, the animal is a kind of anti-Child embodying the antithesis to Edelman’s theory on reproductive futurism, since the animal does not carry any promises regarding the continuation of humanity (or, to borrow Halberstam and Livingston’s [1995, p. 12] formulation, the perpetuation of the code of the human). The animal companion does not, in contrast to the child, symbolise emotional investments, projections or hopes for the future, and since the animals, with their shorter lifespans, normally die before us, they do not represent (as the child does) the nuclear family’s reproduction of the social order, but rather remind us of our own impermanence. (Pedersen, 2011, p. 73) Pedersen distances herself from Dell’Aversano’s agenda for reducing human reproduction in favour of better and more congenial conditions for a smaller human population, instead suggesting that such analysis nevertheless ‘opens a veritable abyss of contentious and ambiguous questions, and in so doing, also expands the register of their possible interconnections’ (74). While Pedersen’s mobilisation of Saramago is largely prefatory, rather than fundamental, to her argument, I have drawn here on Saramago’s and Perec’s texts as offering further analytical illustrations of the edges, intersections, alignments and compatibilities of varieties of materialism. In relation to Child as method, lest my reading of Saramago’s textual mobilisations of children/childhood seems merely to reiterate heteropatriarchal expressions of reproductive futurism, it is worth recalling – as Sabine (2001) notes – that when, at the end of The Stone Craft, all the sexually active women in Portugal of child-bearing age find themselves pregnant, this is of a piece with Saramago’s dystopian (rather than utopian) commitments. At the key moment of potential (national, transnational, regional and interpersonal) renewal, when the Iberian Peninsula has stopped drifting into unknown geopolitical perils, this national condition of fecundity is portrayed as likely to spell a new crisis – whether over economic resources (caused by a rapid population boom within a limited national space) or more interpersonal – if equally ideologically structured heteropatriarchal – concerns around men’s suspicions around paternity. Saramago places his political faith in people, not systems,

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and their creative responses to, engagements with and adaptations to changing conditions. Materialisms: old, new and ‘silly’

This book claims materialism as a necessary analytical term, mobilised here in both general and specific senses; general, in the sense of grounding discussions of Child as method within specific historical, political, geographical and economic conditions; specific, in the sense of alluding to a range of political economic evaluations and models that link Marxist, feminist, queer, and anticolonial analyses and activisms. Materialism, as the philosophical approach that sees everything as in some senses based on or built on physical properties, does not of course mean that those physical properties are all there is. Or even that these properties entirely cause or determine psychic or social phenomena, although they certainly produce, constrain and engender them, as long-standing philosophical discussions (on free will and determinism, mind-body relations and other varieties of reductionism) highlight. In philosophical terms, this is a monist, as opposed to dualist, position. It is also anti-essentialist. New materialists criticise the poststructuralist focus on representation and discursivity, preferring instead to focus on performativity. Hence, as I noted in my rationale for the focus on texts by Perec and Saramago, I worry that this too quickly jettisoning of discussions of representation risks oversimplifying complexities and specific contextual medications, including inter and intra-relations (or even entanglements). Instead, I  have chosen to base my analysis in this Part on the texts of two authors whose literary depictions, I  suggest, offer helpful resources for avoiding such impasses. This is notwithstanding their postmodern play with questions of authorial positioning, including, in Perec’s case, explicit mobilisation of sometimes apparently arbitrary narrative constraints (that thereby draw attention to the art and artifice of narration), and philosophical alignments that include Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben (in Perec’s case there are also Lacanian psychoanalytic influences), as well as the work of Jacques Derrida and others of the so-called ‘poststructuralist’ (as also postcolonial) canon (Salzani & Vanhoutte, 2018). This is also notwithstanding the fact that the texts I have considered here are often obviously framed as allegorical or metaphorical, even if the didactic message is obscured, or perhaps wilfully underdetermined, to convey the political point that what will happen is not yet fixed. Similarly, my analytical strategy here in discussing the texts of these two authors is materialist, working with the textual material, with its textuality and materiality, to explore and open up ambits of meaning and unanticipated readings that – indeed – have come to surpass my initial rationale for selecting those texts. The fact

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that such instabilities and unpredictabilities arise can itself be understood as an effect of the material encounter structured into reading and writing this account and my engagement with these texts, as well as (I hope) yours with mine. Doubtless my reading is incomplete and contestable, but the fact that the texts will support other readings and interpretation is itself indicative of reading as a potentially materialist and empirical activity, like all others. As we have seen, in both Perec and Saramago’s literary explorations of the complex relations between the individual and sociopolitical, or the individual citizen or refugee with the state and transnational order, everything is matter, and everything and everyone matters. Psychic phenomena are relatively autonomous, that is, are not absolutely determined or reducible to, material conditions, but – as Perec and Saramago each show in their different ways – forms of thinking are framed by prevailing ideological frameworks, that in turn may undergo some shift under conditions of material change. Far from the pieties of economistic Marxism, their focus is on local, particular human and non-human relations, and what these can afford in the way of maintaining or transforming individual and transindividual subjectivities and socialities. In childhood and educational studies, the claim to materialism highlights the contingent, relational, co-constitutive and responsive. Child as method is likewise concerned with specific material conditions and relations, tracing the ways cultural-historical and embodied practices around children and childhood enact and institute geopolitical agendas. As indicated earlier, ‘new materialist’ analyses drawing on Karen Barad, Bruno Latour, Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze and others, especially as they circulate in educational and childhood studies, largely take these as the starting point for their discussions rather than considering their relationship with other (‘older’?) varieties. Before the advent of ‘new’ materialism, there were of course various other forms. Notably, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels drew on such models to formulate their critique of capitalist social relations and modes of production, but this did not mean that they regarded everything to be reducible to economics alone. This would be a kind of ‘vulgar’ materialism that overlooked cultural and psychological phenomena, ignoring ideology or social understandings in favour of determining economic forces. There is also an exaggerated version of vulgar materialism that is rife in ideological commonsense under capitalism that Marx called ‘abject materialism’ (McNeill, 2021). Abject materialism describes the worship of commodities, particular the money commodity and its supposedly material instantiation in gold, and here it is as if, in this fetishised relation to objects, they hold some special value. Instead, from Marx, critical theory has long been concerned with historical materialism, that is, the idea that historical change arises from the dynamics of class societies and relations of labour, which also includes struggle and contradiction (so bringing in notions of dialectics).

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V.I. Lenin’s pamphlet, significantly originally entitled ‘The Infantile Sickness of “Leftism” in Communism’ (later entitled “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder) was written for the 1920 conference of the Second World Congress of the Comintern in the midst of the Russian civil war (Lenin, 1920/2016). A copy was presented to every delegate. In this, Lenin cautioned against what he called a ‘silly materialism’ that prioritised economic analyses over nuanced engagement with specific and shifting political conditions. For Lenin, ‘silly materialism’ (the ‘infantile disorder’ of his subtitle) is immature (his term) and inadequate, by which he meant the politically naïve position of some new political enthusiasts (Sylvia Pankhurst was among the various targets of this critique) whose ‘ultra-leftism’, he argued, actually overlooked the exigencies of current conditions, including the need to forge alliances and engage with existing structures to then work to destabilise them. (The notion of some kind of transitional programme is central here.) Lenin argued that, in its abstraction from current historical conditions, this silly materialism was not materialist at all. Mareeva and Mareev (2018, p. 67) reformulate Lenin’s claim, shorn of the implied childist insult and normative claim to (dis)order: ‘The clever idealist is nearer to wise materialism than silly materialism’), or in a different translation (from Marxists.org) is: ‘Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism’ (Lenin, 1915). This statement converges with critical reflections from feminist, postcolonial and critical animal studies reviewed earlier who query why new materialists are so keen to get rid of humanism. While Lenin’s (1920) ‘silly’ or ‘stupid’ materialism may be specific to his political moment, there are other somewhat ‘silly’ (or simplistic) materialisms at play in recent debates. Barad (for example) herself explicitly acknowledges the debt of her framework – of performativity, agential realism and intraaction – to Marxism and to other theorists (such as Foucault) informed by Marxism (see, e.g. Juelskjær, & Schwennesen, 2012; Barad, 2003). Yet from my reading of the now extensive literature that draws upon these posthuman performativity perspectives in childhood and educational research, it is striking how the enthusiastic claims for what can be achieved with this approach presume its innovation rather than evaluate its relations with what it is presumed to supersede. Or else the accounts include some kind of throw-away comment about the supposed ‘dualism’, determinism or reification at work in Marxist approaches (to cite references here seems invidious but I can supply them if needed!). This is despite the acknowledged importance of feminist and critical race approaches in many accounts (e.g. Kraftl, 2020), which draw upon as well as extend Marxist concepts and methods. My concern is not to dispute the value of this current strand of research, which is creative, exciting and important in formulating new approaches to research and empirical insights. Rather, I  am somewhat perplexed by the lack of engagement with the earlier materialist traditions and the presumed

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self-evidence of the conceptual claims, or ‘straw’ versions of historical and dialectical materialist approaches put forward. Moreover, it seems significant that – with some notable exceptions, especially feminists such as Donna Haraway (who herself is at pains to ward off the designation ‘posthuman’) – much of the new materialist-inspired literature does not mention such material matters as class and labour. As my earlier discussion highlighted (in Chapter 8), this point is also what prompted criticism of the race-blindness and queer insensitivity of many of the new materialist discussions. In their assertion of a presumed common human subject, what is being overlooked by the new materialists is how the human that is presented as in need of decentring, or of divesting of its privileged status, in fact reinscribes structures of racialised, classed, cisgendered and heterosexed privilege. Indeed, in the rush to divest the critic of their Eurocentrically inflected humanist privilege, they risk doing the work of invisibilising or occluding the complexities, diversities and resourceful contestations and resistances of those contradictory relations. This move perhaps smacks of a desire towards a position of innocence, a move which runs counter to understandings of situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988) and new materialists’ avowed strategies of working with entanglement and ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016). Notwithstanding this striking absence, or silence, on the part of many new materialist practitioners, there have been some constructive as well as critical engagements with this approach from (supposed) subscribers to ‘older’ versions. Unsurprisingly, some critics dispute the characterisation of the model of Marxism supposedly being surpassed, identifying conceptual simplifications at the level of politics and scale. A widely cited article proposes instead that new materialist approaches risk reinstating individualism: [They] subordinate politics to epistemology, or worse, mistake the latter to be a purified version of the former. Politics understood instead as the pursuit of often divergent interests, passions, desires and needs – as a realm inseparable from if not defined by precisely the negotiation of and contestation over materialized differences and exclusions we must live – appears merely as the presumed beneficiary of better subjects who practice better knowing. (Washick & Wingrove, 2015, p. 73) Washick and Wingrove suggest that the focus on decentring the subject works to displace the problem from the ‘sovereign human self’, onto matter. This situates agency outside of the domain of intervention, such that: ‘the new materialisms might unwittingly be re-locating that self’s most unique and problematic attributes – for example, its apparent need to compare, judge, weigh, reflect and, ultimately, to choose – in worldly processes themselves’

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(Washick  & Wingrove, 2015, p.  74). This not only introduces (‘stupid’, ‘silly’) essentialist or idealist claims back into new materialist accounts but, perhaps more significantly, what this gives rise to is what Washick and Wingrove (2015) call a ‘narrowing of collective action’ (77). This is a vital point, for meaningful political change must come from collective, rather than individual, engagement. A different approach is taken by those who dispute new materialist characterisations of historical materialism: According to new materialism, then, historical materialism has at least three major faults: it is torn between two incompatible views of science, both of them outdated; it privileges human beings as rational and masterful agents; and it relies on a dualistic and hierarchical ontology that separates non-human Nature from human Society. It is for this reason that for many new materialists Marxism is at best an anachronism. (Choat, 2018, p. 1033) Choat evaluates these criticisms, acknowledging their relevance to some mistaken versions of materialist analyses. On the other hand, Choat acknowledges a reciprocal misconstruction: ‘Conversely, Marxist critiques of new materialism have characterised the latter as mystificatory and obscurantist . . .’ (1033). Instead, he offers an analysis of three key areas in which ‘old’ and ‘new’ materialism are said to differ – on models of science, agency and ontology, arguing that What distinguishes historical materialism from new materialism, then, is not that the former contrasts an active humanity with a passive nonhuman world, but that it is more attentive to the historical variability of humannonhuman relations and to the forms of power and ownership with which those relations are imbued. (1035) This nuanced evaluation offers an appreciation of both approaches, highlighting their different analytical and methodological strengths. Nevertheless, Choat’s identification of the distinctive critical-analytical project that informs historical materialist analyses is of particular importance: The advantage of historical materialism, however, is that rather than simply exploring new affinities or alliances between the natural and social sciences, it sets out to investigate the material conditions of the separation, asking what are the divisions of intellectual and manual labour that have led to the isolation of science (e.g. Sohn-Rethel, 1978). What forms of power have benefitted from that isolation? Hence rather than basing their

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materialism on an interpretation of science, Marxism offers a materialist account of the development and role of modern science. (1035) On the question of agency, or in its less abstracted new materialist renderings, ‘agential realism’ or ‘agentic capacities’, Washick and Wingrove (2015) argue against the relativising impulse of new materialist approaches as disingenuous and politically undermining: The new materialist approach to agency risks depoliticising situations: if we do not know which actors are more important than others then we deny ourselves the ability to intervene in the hope of altering the existing balance of forces. Indeed, more than simply leaving us without the resources to analyse and resist asymmetrical power relations, in its emphasis on relations of becoming, contingency, change, openness, and suppleness, new materialism tends to obscure the very existence of enduring or rigid structures of power and the reproduction of relations of domination and exploitation. (65) This last point about understating existing structures of power and relations of domination seems particularly important. Here, we might note that both Saramago and Perec offer accounts that are open to human ingenuity as well as resistance to change, and that include group as well as individual (human and nonhuman) action. This is alongside equivalent attention to the (institutional, governmental and transnational) structures that fix, exploit and oppress, as well as shape, people and ‘things’ (including producing racialised, heteropatriarchally gendered and generational orders). On ontology, or theories of being, there appears to be greater compatibility across the old and new varieties of materialism than new materialists seem to acknowledge, since both seek to break or transcend the major ontological oppositions that have structured modern thinking. These include NatureSociety and Object-Subject, as well as the human–nonhuman (and exploring who counts as human). However, Choat emphasises that historical materialism is not merely concerned with explaining these ontological divisions, for example by blaming the conceptual limitations within Descartes’ or Kant’s ideas. Rather, it is concerned with identifying and analysing the material processes by which whereby nature and society were divided. Hence its question ‘is not so much how to reunite these two poles, but how and for what reasons they could have been separated in the first place’ (Choat 16). At issue, then, across these critiques, are two key differences of focus and project, such that historical-materialist analysis: helps explain both the material conditions and the enduring power of the Nature-Society divide. More than merely a philosophical or conceptual

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error, the divide helps to maintain existing (capitalist) distributions of wealth and power. . . . Second, the historical materialist analysis avoids presenting “humanity” as a single, unified agent (cf. Moore, 2015, p. 6). The “externality” of nature is understood and experienced differently by different agents. (Washick & Wingrove, 2015, pp. 17–18) Both historical and new materialist analyses, then, share the key commitment to critique and overturn prevailing individual/society, science/politics dualisms that are also at play within the separation of culture from nature. In my opinion, the claim that ‘new materialism tends towards ahistorical analyses that ignore, or at least downplay, relations of power and ownership’ (Choat, 2018, p.  1040) has some justification. Like these authors, I  have explored the ways the transposition of scientific (notably that most abstract and elitist scientific discipline, physics) might function to reinstate rather than dismantle prevailing scientisms, rather than, as historical materialism does, sustain an analysis of power relations and divisions of labour within gave rise to this science and how it functions within these. Choat (2018) summarises the contribution of historical materialism as follows: Rather than extending agency to everything, historical materialism insists that we need both to understand how different agents have acquired their powers to act and to acknowledge the asymmetric power relations within which their agency is developed and enacted. Finally, rather than opposing the ontological division of nature and society simply by pointing to their actual imbrication, historical materialism explores the historical origins and persistence of the division and the differential experience of and access to nature that is characteristic of contemporary society. (1040) Of course, it could be argued that the historical materialists present as bowdlerised a version of new materialists as they claim the latter do of them. Yet I think there is merit in some of their arguments, and at the very least, important reminders, if also some mutual learning that can take place. Taking up this question, Suzanne Lettow (2017) rightly diagnoses as a central problem of posthumanism that it: submerges relations of difference, power and domination into a great posthuman “we”. . . . The general problem here is that agency is transferred to anonymous, meta-historical forces like matter or life. . . . This includes the highly specific and historically contingent forms of human-nature relations and sociotechnological regimes that need to be studied with regard to the very specific and highly stratified assemblages of “human” and “nonhuman” agents. (111)

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She echoes concerns identified in other accounts about the incipient abstraction and universalisation, as well as unproblematised scientistic tendencies, in new materialist analyses. She develops her critique further, attributing the ontological turn to ‘a longing to grasp the totality and truth of being, and the desire to inhabit an uncontested position of knowledge’ (110). In the light of the arguments elaborated throughout this book, across Parts 1 and II, such longings and desires remain reminiscent of dynamics driving developmentalism, as so evocatively described by Ypi (2021) in the figure of the World Bank functionary discussed in Chapter 7. Lettow claims that new materialist analysis is not equipped to offer an adequate account of the core processes that need to be explained, since To analyze such assemblages would require a differentiated theory of subjectivity which is able to distinguish between the specific forms of dynamics, activity and praxis that characterize the different entities. The concepts of the human, the nonhuman and the posthuman are all far too general with respect to the complex realities they seek to articulate. (111) Clearly this argument brings the ‘old’ materialists into alignment with indigenous and postcolonial critics (see also Curley et al., 2022), as noted also in Chapter 8. More recently, Geczy (2022) takes this hostile evaluation further, claiming that the ‘new’ of new materialism in fact institutes ‘an exhortation to believe, to remember, and to return’ (89) that risks implicitly introducing ‘a neoconservative sentimentalism based on superannuated and ultimately noxious premises’ (ibid.). While I am not, of course, suggesting that all posthuman or new materialist accounts do this, such cautionary claims prompt reflection, especially in the light of explorations of the psychic and political functions of emotions, especially sentimentality, elaborated in Part I of this book. Nor is there any reason to believe that childhood and educational researchers are immune from these considerations. Yet attentive discussions to the multiple but specific spatio-temporalities instituted by configurations of child, children and childhood at play can help ward off this problem. This chapter has attempted to explore such differentiated models of subjectivity and indicate how child as implicated in these. Making Child as method material, with Perec and Saramago

Child as method is a materialist analysis, an approach that attempts to engage and enact both old and new materialist insights. Its specific focus on the child as a key, constitutive axis of material relations demonstrates the need to attend to particular dynamics that structure human and non-human

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relations, as well as critiquing whiteness and spurious generalisation that sometimes enter discussions of the Anthropocene. In the analysis in Chapters 9 and 10 of the treatment of child in Perec’s Things and Saramago’s The Lives of Things, I  attempted to indicate what can be achieved from close reading and analysis of these specific texts as illuminating more general concerns with the forms and conditions of socially structured relations (of production and consumption) and corresponding subjectivities and objectivities produced under late capitalism. Alienation was a particular focus in Perec’s text, while his protagonists’ separation from their own personal (and class) history, as well as failure to engage more extensively with their racialised and colonial privilege, are indicated by the configurations of childhood at play. This is what enables their recruitment into the very system that they originally set out to resist. Perec undoes the boundary between human and nonhuman, since the ‘things’ that his characters desire seem to have more life than they do. Taking a rather different approach, Saramago’s explorations in the short story collection The Lives of Things indicate a range of agentic positions and relations that challenge, undo and even reverse prevailing orders of use and exploitation. Conceptions of child figure as a key component in the modernist nostalgic mourning for lost connection with nature but also in abetting and sometimes personifying the return or revenge of what has been repressed, or objectified. In this sense, both Perec and Saramago arrive at similar understandings of the ways humans and non-humans can combine and even reverse roles. This was also elaborated in Part I in relation to historical and cultural conditions for this to take place, which also connect and order not only generational positionings but also their intersections with gendered, sexed, able-bodied, heteronormative and especially racialised and colonial orders. Far from being incompatible, then, the two forms of materialism share many features but have different emphases. The challenge therefore is to ward off ‘the new materialist tendency to see historical materialism as a rival, inferior, and incompatible tradition, and to invite new materialisms into more productive dialogue’ (Choat, 2018, p.  1040). This also entails being sceptical about a commitment to ‘new materialism’ grounded in an abstract academic tradition, rather than political practice. Notwithstanding all the academic grandstanding, as Truman (2019) also makes clear, there is clearly scope for historical materialists and new materialisms to mutually inform and enrich each other. Further, while new materialist debates import greater attention to all living and non-living beings, such concerns are certainly not absent from Marxism as environmentalist debates have been highlighting for some time (Evans, 2017; Pellow, 2017). New materialism rightly foregrounds critiques of anthropocentrism and asserts the need to attend to dynamics and relations with the nonhuman world. Yet this chapter has attempted to show

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how old and new varieties of materialisms both have distinctive contributions and can work together. Lettow (2017) identifies as a key task for any critical materialist account ‘to analyze socio-natural constellations and to reveal possibilities of transgressing and overcoming the sedimented power relations that shape them’ (119). This is what this Child as method analysis has attempted throughout this book, as well as in this part via the interpretation of Perec’s and Saramago’s texts. Disordering materialisms, and geopolitical orders

As discussed earlier, Lenin’s ‘infantile’ characterisation of some forms of materialist (here explicitly communist) analysis treats youthful engagement as equivalent to being inarticulate (infans – without speech), naïve, impulsive, lacking in experience, and (thereby in his view) counter-productive. (Note, these are the associations generated by the term ‘infantile’, rather than explicit claims on his part, as what is meant by this is curiously unspecified, albeit that this fact itself indicates the presumed ‘obviousness’ or naturalised status of the assumptions at play.) For Lenin, being ‘infantile’ here meant being ‘ultra-leftist’, in his terms, being unwilling to make the kind of alliances that he saw as helping advance the communist cause by being too precipitous and uncompromising. Yet, as noted, Sylvia Pankhurst (from my hometown, Manchester, so please allow me this Eurocentric example) was one of those so designated (indeed the pamphlet was principally addressed as a criticism of and reprimand to her). Yet she was a clear-sighted revolutionary who demonstrated in her life and work the importance of coalitions and of linking across struggles of the oppressed, to create solidarities and foster mass mobilisations for liberation for all. From the struggle of the women’s suffragettes for the vote (with her mother and sisters), she became very involved in the Labour Movement – clearly seeing common cause (and key intersections) between women’s emancipation and that of the working class. Indeed it was the recognition of what has been called ‘femonationalism’ (feminists allying with right-wing movements and the state) (Farris, 2017; Möser, 2022), that led to Sylvia Pankhurst’s political and familial rift with the Women’s Social and Political Union, the organisation for women’s suffrage her family founded, as it was her support not only for the Labour Movement but also for Home Rule for Ireland that led to her expulsion from it in 1914. Unlike her mother and sisters (one of whom, Adela, later became fascist), Sylvia became active in anticolonial movements, specifically supporting the Ethiopian liberation struggle against the 1936–1941 invasion by the fascist Italian state – indeed she subsequently moved and lived the rest of her life working there. I dwell on this epithet ‘infantile disorder’ as there would be little merit in re-installing another developmental hierarchy, even by reversing Lenin’s

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dismissive designation ‘infantile’; for this would merely return to a romanticist model of ‘the child as father to the man’. Far from being something innate or intrinsic to her youthful status (although standpoint theory would suggest that subalternity and subordinate status offer key perspectives unavailable to the powerful, Harding, 2004), Pankhurst’s convictions and commitments were generated via her long history of engagement, from practical activity and struggle – praxis. And it may be no accident that young people are now at the forefront of environmental protection and climate change activisms now, whose interface with anticolonial struggles is along with supporting the millions of people suffering and increasingly displaced by war and global warming (or, even worse, now boiling). Rather than being a ‘disorder’ – a dreadful mobilisation of pathologising medical discourse on Lenin’s part to convey this as an insult (surely also reflecting the contemporary rise of medical authority), or indignantly repudiating the ‘infantile’ status (and so confirming adultist developmentalist and ethical normativities), we could – as in Gay liberation movements – turn the slur noun into a verb: disordering. Disturbing developmental orders, including generational ones, is what this book – as a practice of Child as method – has been about: disordering these orders by interrogating how they have come about, what other axes (including those structured around gendered, sexed. racialised, classed positionings) they rely upon and enable, the social and geopolitical agendas they fulfil, and especially, what alignments and solidarities they invite. This book has focused on the ways figurations surrounding notions of child reflect, disclose and interrogate the orders of human-non-human and more-than-human relations as significant enactors and moderators of wider axes of power. In Part I the focus was on relations with animals, attending to historical and current ways both child and animal have come to circumscribe the boundaries of what is deemed human that notably are at work in those terrible human practices of racism and colonialism. Having topicalised the role of emotion and sentiment, as a significant force galvanising these relations, Part II took up this question inwards, considering the alien, perhaps inhuman or all-too-human, question of desire – especially the desire for development – within models of the formation of subjectivity as socio-­politically structured forms of interior design. Contributions, as well as potential resistances, to popular cultural and policy recruitments of the child within developmentalism were discussed. Part III moved to consider interpellations of child within debates and varieties of materialism, as a major framework for analysing geopolitics and political economy, as well as a key arena of academic activism engaging childhood and educational scholars seeking to link with wider environmental and anticolonial struggles. The question of affect or emotion, as well as the relationship between interiority and material questions of justice, redistribution and reparation, remains crucial, as

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Clarke’s (2019) discussion of international law and the Pan-African project highlights. I end this book and conclude this argument for now (for the work continues) as follows. Rather than reversing old over new, or replacing old with new, materialisms, which would reinstate a developmentalist trajectory of one kind or another, I  have taken an awry (askew, perverse or improper, even?) approach. The methodological intervention here was to read materialisms via Child as method as being as inevitably as much cultural-historical and political in construction as ‘natural’, such that overlooking the analytical-political possibilities of these cultural representations would be to miss a key trick and tool. George Perec and José Saramago were my literary companions and inspirations for this disordering, perhaps irreverent, take on recent debates on materialism, just as Octavia Butler helped upend prevailing orders of modern human–animal relations in Part I, as instantiated in iconic cultural resources such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This has been my practice of Child as method in this book, to disorder prevailing orderings of child and childhood, disclose their geopolitical efficacies, and invite new possibilities. References Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Choat, S. (2018). Science, agency and ontology: A historical-materialist response to new materialism. Political Studies, 66(4), 1027–1042. Clarke, K. M. (2019). Affective justice: The international criminal court and the panAfricanist pushback. Duke University Press. Curley, A., Gupta, P., Lookabaugh, L., Neubert, C., & Smith, S. (2022). Decolonisation is a political project: Overcoming impasses between Indigenous sovereignty and abolition. Antipode, 54(4), 1043–1062. Dell’Aversano, C. (2010). The love whose name cannot be spoken: Queering the human-animal bond. https://arpi.unipi.it/handle/11568/141018 Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press. Evans, B. S. (2017).  Beyond transhumanism: The dangers of transhumanist philosophies on human and nonhuman beings  [Doctoral dissertation, Iowa State University]. Farris, S. R. (2017).  In the name of women’s rights: The rise of femonationalism. Duke University Press. Geczy, A. (2022). Bland matter: New materialism, and barking up the wrong tree. In S. Douglas, A. Geczy, & S. Lowry (Eds.), Where is art? (pp. 89–100). Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Haraway, D. J. (2016).  Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

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Harding, S. G. (Ed.). (2004). The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies. Psychology Press. Juelskjær, M., & Schwennesen, N. (2012). Intra-active entanglements – An interview with Karen Barad. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1–2). Kraftl, P. (2020). After childhood: Re-thinking environment, materiality and media in children’s lives. Routledge. Lenin, V. I. (1915). Conspectus of Hegel’s book Lectures on the history of philosophy. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/cons-lect/ch03.htm Lenin, V. I. (1920/2016). “Left-wing” communism: An infantile disorder. Reprinted from V. I. Lenin (1952). Selected works (Foreign Languages Publishing House). Red Star Publications. Lettow, S. (2017). Turning the turn: New materialism, historical materialism and critical theory. Thesis Eleven, 140(1), 106–121. Mareeva, E.,  & Mareev, S. (2018). Hegelian dialectics and Soviet Marxism (from Vladimir Lenin to Evald Ilyenkov). In A. Bartonek & A. Burman (Eds.), Hegelian Marxism: The uses of Hegel’s philosophy in Marxist theory from Georg Lukács to Slavoj Žižek (pp. 61–80). Södertörns högskola. McNeill, D. (2021). Fetishism and the theory of value: Reassessing Marx in the 21st century. Palgrave Macmillan. Möser, C. (2022). The scandal of women’s emancipation. Femonationalism, rightwing sexual politics, and anti-feminism.  Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 29(4), 1544–1565. Pedersen, H. (2011). Release the moths: Critical animal studies and the posthumanist impulse. Culture, Theory and Critique, 52(1), 65–81. Pellow, D. N. (2017). What is critical environmental justice? John Wiley & Sons. Perec, G. (1965/1967). Things: A story of the sixties. Grove Press. Perec, G. (1999). Species of spaces and other pieces (J. Sturrock, Ed. and Trans.). Penguin. Sabine, M. J. (2001). Form and ideology in the novels of Jose Saramago, 1980–1989. The University of Manchester. Salzani, C., & Vanhoutte, K. K. (2018). Introduction: Proteus the philosopher, or reading Saramago as a lover of wisdom. In C. Salzani & K. K. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Saramago’s philosophical heritage (pp. 1–18). Springer. Saramago, J. (1978/2012). Objecto Quase/The lives of things (G. Pontiero, Trans.). Verso. Saramago, J. (2005/2008). As Intermitências da Morte/Death with interruptions. Mariner Books. Saramago, J. (2008/2010). A Viagem do Elefante/The elephant’s journey. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brace. Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978).  Intellectual and manual labour: A  critique of epistemology (Vol. 224). Brill. Truman, S. E. (2019). Feminist new materialisms. In P. A. Atkinson, S. Delamont, M. A. Hardy, & M. Williams (Eds.), The SAGE encyclopedia of research methods. Sage. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036 Washick, B., & Wingrove, E. (2015). Ontologized agency and political critique. Contemporary Political Theory, 14(1), 63–79. Ypi, L. (2021). Free: A child and a country at the end of history. Penguin.

INDEX

abject materialism 23, 288 ablenationalism 146 Abraham, K. 134 ACEs see adverse child experiences (ACEs) Adair, G. 220 Adorno, A. 44 – 45, 56 adverse child experiences (ACEs) 141, 154 – 156 affect: blood libel and 50; Cannon on 147 – 148; emotional support animals and 74 – 75; honour and 56; overview of 16, 96 – 98; pets and/as children and 103 – 106; speciesist stereotypes and 106 – 108; Wolff on 174 – 175; see also sentiment affectional speciesist stereotypes 106 – 108 affective communities 106 after education 10 Agamben, G. 252, 287 Ahmed, S. 56 – 57 alibis 91 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 15, 68; child-animal relations and 70 – 75 Allen, G. 148 Allen Reports 148 – 149, 152 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) 73 Angola 267 animacy 91 – 92 animal 285 – 287

animal-human comparisons, repetitions of 83 – 88 animality 11, 31, 263; infra-human and 32 – 33; of the Jew 33 animal studies 209; overview of 15 – 16; posthuman debates and 285 – 287 Anna Freud Centre 172 anterior future 136 antidevelopmental 12 – 13, 20 antidevelopmentalism 142; versus antidevelopmentalist 10; psychoanalysis and 17, 127 – 137; teaching and learning 6 – 10 antidevelopmentalist 4, 5, 9, 197 – 198; versus antidevelopmentalism 10; elements of 17; Green and 178; psychoanalysis as 13, 129 – 130; queer theory and 146 – 148 antisemitism 44, 194; honour and 56 – 57; as indigenous British resistance to Norman occupation 45 – 48; neighbours/compatriots and, distinguishing between 55 – 56 Anzaldúa, G. 4 Arce, M. C. 154 Ariès, P. 99 Aristophanes 73 Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, The (Perec) 218, 221 Asia as method (Chen) 2, 4, 12, 36, 189 As Pequenas Memorias/Small Memories (Saramago) 255 – 256

Index  301

Balowski, K. T. 222, 223 Baltasar and Blimunda (Memorial do Convento) (Saramago) 252 Barad, K. 288 Baradian, K. 268 Barlow, J. 152 Barthes, R. 98, 222 Beinart, J. 80 – 81 Bellos, D. 217, 218, 220, 221, 224, 227 – 229, 230 – 231 Benjamin, J. 115 – 116 Benjamin, W. 51, 111, 217, 227, 252, 287 Bennett, G. 44, 49 Berg, H. 73 Berwick, A. 57 best start for life: a vision for the 1001 critical days, The (UK government document) 151 – 152 Bhambra, G. K. 119 Bick, E. 182 Binet, C. 218 Black feminism 34 – 35, 128 #BlackLivesMatter movement 91 Black Skin White Masks (Fanon) 11, 32, 86, 131 – 132, 245 ‘Bloodchild’ (Butler) 60 – 61 blood libel: from boy to girl 53 – 55; honour and 42 – 45, 56 – 57; Jews connection with 43, 45 – 48; neighbours/strangers and, distinguishing between 55 – 56; Norman rule and 45 – 48; origins of 42 – 43; power of 48 – 50; timeline of 43 Blyton, E. 86 Bonds of Love (Benjamin) 115 – 116 Border as method (Mezzadra & Neilson) 2 Bowlby, J. 170 – 172 Bradbury, M. 264 Braidotti, R. 288 brain development vs. brain function 152 Breivik, A. 57 British Psychoanalytic Society 179 Britzman, D. P. 10 Brown, P. 89 Buckland, F. 108 Bunty (comics) 163 Burr, R. 151 Butler, J. 147 Butler, O. E. 14 – 15, 59 – 62, 298 Campos, A. S. 252, 265 Cannella, G. 89 – 90

Cannon, K. L. 145 – 146, 147 capitalism 12, 21, 44, 51, 92; in Albania 191 – 192; boy child as a prototypical subject under 53 – 54; cognitive 204; Jews and 44; late 209, 229, 233; racial 22 – 23, 35, 50, 206, 209, 238; Saramago and 254, 256, 270 – 271, 295; Strathern on 106 Carroll, L. 15, 70, 80, 82, 298; see also child-animal relations causality 135 Caverna/The Cave (Saramago) 254, 278 ‘Centaur, The’ (Saramago) 274 – 275, 279 ‘Chair, The’ (Saramago) 266 – 269, 279 Changing the Subject (Henriques) 129, 163 Chantler, K. 59 Chen, K. H. 3 – 4, 12, 19, 36, 189, 190 – 191 Chen, M. 91 – 92 Chen, M. Y. 105 child-animal relations 68 – 93; Alice in Wonderland example 70 – 75; childsaving and 81 – 83; colonial period perceptions of 80 – 81; Dodgson and 70 – 71; gender and 75 – 77; (girl) child representations of 77 – 80; home/ land and 90 – 93; overview of 68 – 70; postcolonial repetitions of 83 – 88; preposition ‘as’ or ‘as if’ use and 88 – 90 child as icon 50 – 53 Child as method: developmentalism, alternatives to 195 – 198; versus developmentalism 4 – 5; gender and 33 – 36; honour and 14 – 15, 33 – 36; infant observation and 172 – 173; as intersectional feminist approach 33 – 36; intersectionality and 41 – 42; introduction to 2 – 4; Les Choses/ Things and 231 – 233, 238 – 243; Lives of Things and 278 – 281; making, with Perec and Saramago 294 – 296; nature/truth claims and 117 – 119; overview of 11 – 13; Perec and 222 – 226, 243 – 248; postcolonialism and 31 – 32, 222; uses of 3 – 4; see also honour child development in state economic development 148 – 149 Childhood (journal) 127, 173 child-monkey association, sentiment and 108 – 110

302 Index

child protection 31 child ritual murder 53 – 57; from boy to girl 53 – 55; honour and 56 – 57; neighbours/strangers and, distinguishing between 55 – 56; overview of 53 child-saving 81 – 83 Child Trauma Academy 148 – 149 Choat, S. 291 – 293 Chodorow, N. 165 Cixous, H. 165 Clarke, K. M. 297 – 298 climate anxiety 151 Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion (Anderson) 160 Cocks, N. 1, 52 – 53, 210 cognitive capitalism 204 Cold War Childhood project 36 colonialism 3, 15, 23; African children and 80 – 81; blood/honour tales from 42 – 45; child–animal relations and 68 – 70; Jew status during 53 – 57; Perec and 222 – 226; psychoanalysis and 130; Stoler on 106 companion animal 16, 286 companion species 104 Costa, H. 263, 268, 276 countertransference 180 critical humanism 216 critical psychology 16, 119, 129 Crooks, S. 51 culture-natures: of childhood, histories of 31 – 62 (see also honour; honour crimes); overview of 11 – 12 Cushman, P. 174 cybernetics 216 Darwin, C. 77 – 78, 79 Davidson, N. 223 de Beauvoir, S. 32 decolonial critiques, new materialism and 207 – 209 Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (Burman) 8, 9, 130 decoupling 205 deferred action 135 Deleuze, G. 90, 288 Dell’Aversano, C. 286 DeLoache, J. S. 20, 168, 193, 198 dematerialisation 205 – 206 de M’Uzan, M. 221 Derrida, J. 83, 107, 129, 287

development, economic 6, 8, 81, 104 – 105, 190 development, individual 7 – 8, 118, 190, 232; to group 166 – 167 developmentalism: versus Child as method 4 – 5; problems with 5 – 6; resisting 19 – 20; stage 134 – 135; teaching and learning anti- 6 – 10 developmentalism, alternatives to 188 – 198; the Baby of ‘His Majesty the Baby’ 193; Child as method 195 – 198; fiction as truth and 193 – 195; ‘His Majesty the Baby’ and 189 – 190; His of ‘His Majesty the Baby’ 190; Majesty of ‘His Majesty the Baby’ 190 – 192; overview of 188; A World of Babies and 193 – 195 developmentalisms, cultural-ideological contexts of 18, 141 – 156; adverse child experiences and 154 – 156; Cannon on 145 – 146; De Vos on 142 – 143; First 1001 Days Movement and 151 – 154; global economic disparities/inequalities 149 – 151; overview of 141 – 142; queer theory and 146 – 148; role of, in state economic development 148 – 149; ultrasound and 143 – 145 developmentalist 9 – 10, 13; Child as method vs. 4 – 5; culturalideological contexts of 141 – 142; development as logical and 136 – 137; psychoanalysis and 129 – 130; revivals in psychoanalysis 163 – 165 developmental lines 162 developmental science 168 development and child in psychoanalysis 160 – 183; Bowlby and 170 – 172; developmentalist revivals in psychoanalysis 163 – 165; as end of psychoanalysis 161 – 163; finding versus losing inner infant 176 – 179; individual to group 166 – 167; infant observation case 172 – 173; Morss on 167 – 168; non-child developmental subject, retrieving 179 – 183; observed versus clinical infant 173 – 174; overview of 18 – 19, 160 – 161; psychoanalysis as viral developmentalism 168 – 169; Watson on Freud’s ‘fort/da’ game 165 – 166; Wolff on 174 – 176

Index  303

Developments: child, image, nation (Burman) 8 Developments in Infant Observation (Reid) 180 De Vos, J. 142 – 143, 150, 153, 192 Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, The (Laplanche & Pontalis) 221 disadaptation 133 disciplines 51 – 52 divided subject, psychoanalysis and 132 – 133 Dodgson, C. 70 – 71, 72, 76 – 77, 80, 82, 92; see also child-animal relations Dolto, F. 160 – 161, 221 Dreher, A. U. 161 – 162 Dunning, E. 101 Dying Colonialism, A (Fanon) 226 early intervention 8, 18, 83, 141, 198; ACEs and 155 – 156; Allen report and 148; infant observation and 172, 182; vs. language 136 Early intervention: the next steps (Allen) 148 ec-static child 145 – 146; described 147 Edelman, L. 38, 277 education: African prize babies and 81; care and 109 – 111, 149; child protection and 31 – 32; colonised people and 88, 90, 106; decolonial critiques and 207 – 209; literature role as moral 70 – 71; materialisms and 20 – 21, 206 – 207, 210 – 211; nature 100 Edwards, R. 155 Elias, N. 101 Eliot, G. 80 Ellis, L. 180 – 182, 197 ‘Embargo’ (Saramago) 269 – 271, 279 Emde, R. N. 174 emotional support animal (ESA) 74 – 75 endotic 220 Engels, F. 288 equity: alternative reading of 50 – 51; of the child 51; definition of 36; honouring 36 – 37, 50 – 53 Eriksson, M. 55 extimacy 147 – 148 Fanon, F. 3, 11, 12, 32, 86 – 87, 130, 131 – 132, 135, 208, 222 feminism/feminist: antiracist activism 34 – 35; vs. childhood activists

39 – 40; intersectionality approach 33 – 36; psychoanalysis and claims of 129 – 130 femonationalism 296 First 1001 Days Movement 151 – 154 Fisher, M. 246 Fixer, The (Malamud) 54 Fledgling (Butler) 59, 61 Flegel, M. 73, 74, 75, 76, 82 – 83, 87 – 88, 89, 102 – 103 Floyd, G. 91 foetus gazing see ultrasound Fonagy, P. 152, 172 For and against psychoanalysis (Frosh) 160 For Honour and Fame: chivalry in England 1066 – 1500 (Saul) 56 Foucault, M. 97, 129, 287 Found childhood 3 Frederick II, Emperor of Hohenstaufen 50 Free (Ypi) 191 Freud, A. 162, 179 Freud, S. 19, 84, 107, 131, 135, 163 – 165, 167; ‘His Majesty the Baby’ 189 – 190; ‘On Narcissism’ 189 Frosh, S. 160, 162 – 163, 174 Frost, E. A. 145 future anterior 136 Gaddini, E. 160 Galison, P. 98, 119 Galton, F. 79 Garner, R. 80 Gaskell, E. 79 Geczy, A. 294 gender: Butler writings of 59 – 62; childanimal relations and 75 – 77, 100, 108, 110 – 113; Child as method and 33 – 36; and childhood 75 – 80; Freud and 189 – 190; queer theory and 146 – 148; recognition, politics of 3 – 4; Saramago and 251 – 264, 276 – 278; see also blood libel; childanimal relations; honour gendered relations 32 – 33 Gender Trouble (Butler) 147 geopolitical orders, materialism and 296 – 298 Gieryn, T. F. 274 (girl) child representations 77 – 80 global economic disparities/inequalities 149 – 151

304 Index

Goodall, J. 108 Gordon, A. 38, 52 Gottlieb, A. 20, 168, 193 – 194, 198 Green, A. 161, 173, 175, 176, 177 – 178 Green, L. 70 Groarke, S. 182 Growing critical: alternatives to developmental psychology (Morss) 128 Haas, A. M. 145 Hancock, M. 151 Hannity, M. 160 Haraway, D. J. 11, 90 – 91, 104, 108, 207, 208, 262, 263, 290 Harlow, H. 108 Harris, A. 132 – 133 Harris, J. C. 86, 87 Harrowitz, N. 79 Harvey, D. 18, 141 Heimann, P. 180 Hickman, C. 151 Hilal, K. 270, 271 ‘His Majesty the Baby’ (Freud) 19, 189 – 190; the Baby of 193; His of 190; Majesty of 190 – 192 historical subject 134 – 135 history of the present 38 – 39 Hobsbawm, E. 34 Hochschild, A. R. 204 Holland, S. 79 homonationalism 146 honour 31 – 62; blood libel and 42 – 45; Butler examples of 59 – 62; child as icon and 50 – 53; Child as method and 33 – 36; and child concern 38 – 39; child ritual murder and 53 – 57; definitions of 37; equity and 36 – 37; intersectionality and 41 – 42; Norman rule and 45 – 48; othering and 32 – 33; overview of 14 – 15, 31 – 32; stickiness, mobility and ambiguity of 56 – 57; strategies, identified 57 – 59; women as children and 39 – 41 honour crimes 14, 34; from boy to girl 53 – 55; child ritual murder 53 – 57; Islamophobia and 38 – 39; neighbours/strangers, distinguishing between 55 – 56 Horkheimer, M. 44 – 45, 56 Hugh of Lincoln 43, 48 – 49, 50 Hugo, V. 72 Huxley, A. 264

I am a cat (Soseki) 107 icon, described 50 – 51 immaterial labour 20, 204, 229 Imre, R. 191 infancy 172 – 173 infant: inner, finding versus losing 176 – 179; observed versus clinical 173 – 174 ‘Infantile Sickness of ‘Leftism’ in Communism, The’ (Lenin) 23 – 24, 289 infant observation 172 – 173 infra-human 33 infra-ordinary 220 Innocent IV, Pope 50 integration status, psychoanalysis and 133 – 134 intelligent idealist 252 interiority 2, 8, 12 – 13, 32, 268; in Alice in Wonderland 68 – 69; blood libel/ child murder stories and 54 – 55; lack of, in Les Choses 231; materialism relationship with 297 – 298 Interpersonal World of the Infant, The (Stern) 173, 176 intersectionality: Child as method and 33 – 36, 41 – 42; criticisms of 34 – 35; feminist 2, 34; honour and 41 – 42 Ipsos Mori 153 Isaacs, S. 154 Jenkins, D. 255 Jew status 53 – 57; from boy to girl 53 – 55; honour and 56 – 57; neighbours/strangers and, distinguishing between 55 – 56 Johnson, B. 85 Jussila, H. 144 Kindred (Butler) 61 kinship 103 – 104 Kipling, R. 108 Klein, M. 179 Klemperer, V. 107 Knauf, J. 153 knowledge-based economies 204 Kofman, E. 57 Kraftl, P. 210 labour: Butler writings of 59 – 61; child/ children and 113 – 115; gendered relations of 76 – 77; immaterial 20, 204, 229; parental division of 110; Perec and 225, 229, 232 – 233; Saramago

Index  305

and 251 – 252, 266 – 267, 271 – 272, 290 – 293; sustainability, materialism and 204 – 206, 209; women’s domestic, colonialism and 108 Lacan, J. 129, 131, 133 – 134, 136, 147, 167 – 168 La Disparition (Perec) 220 Langer, M. 130 language, psychoanalysis and 136 Language of Psychoanalysis, The (Laplanche and Pontalis) 160 Laplanche, J. 160 Latour, B. 288 La Vie mode d’emploi/Life: a user’s manual (Perec) 218 Lazzarato, M. 205, 229 Leadsom, A. 151 Lee, E. 155 – 156 Lefebre, H. 204 ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Lenin) 23 – 24, 289 Lenin, V. I. 289 Leong, D. 207 – 208 Les Choses/Things (Perec) 21 – 22, 204, 211 – 212, 226 – 229; Child as method and 231 – 233, 238 – 243; Perec on 243 – 248; word “child” appearances in 238 – 240; word “development” appearances in 240 – 242; word “teach” appearances in 242 Lesnik-Oberstein, K. 92, 210 Les Plaideurs (Racine) 73 Lettow, S. 293 – 294, 296 Liddell, A. 71 Light, P. 7 Linklater, E. 108 – 109 Lives of Things/Objecto Quase, The (Saramago) 22 – 23, 212 logical time model 136 – 137 Lopez, A. G. 269 Lorenz, K. 171 love, hate and sentiment 113 – 117 MacFarlane, A. 105 – 106, 114 Macvarish, J. 155 – 156 Malamud, B. 54 Man Asleep, A (Perec) 216, 221 Mannoni, M. 160 – 161, 176 – 177, 178 Mareev, S. 289 Mareeva, E. 289 Marx, K. 288

Massey, I. 72, 109 materialism 203 – 212; abject 23; animals 285 – 287; Choat on 291 – 293; decolonial critiques and new 207 – 209; dialectical 290; geopolitical orders and 296 – 298; historical 209, 253, 265, 284, 288, 291 – 293, 295; labour, sustainability and 204 – 206; new 287 – 288, 290 – 292; new, in childhood/ educational studies 206 – 207; new, old, ‘silly’ 287 – 294; old 209; opposition between old and new 284 – 285; overview of 13, 20 – 21; Perec and 210, 211 – 212, 284; philosophical description of 287; reading 203 – 204; representational approach to 210 – 211; Saramago and 212, 284; silly 23 – 24, 289 – 290 matter 13, 20, 203; Perec and 229 – 231; see also materialism Matthews, H. 219, 230 Mayhew, H. 70, 113 – 114 McClintock, A. 38, 78 – 79, 88 method, described 2 Millei, Z. 3, 191 Mind: a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy (journal) 79 – 80 minoritisation/majoritisation terminology 34 Mitchell, J. 129 Mitchell, S. A. 132 – 133 modernities 16, 119 monkey-child association, sentiment and 108 – 110 monkey dolls 111 – 112 Monkey puzzle 109 – 110 Moosavi, L. 85 more-than-human 11 – 12, 20, 32, 62, 203, 207, 285; Les Choses/ Things and 238; Lives of Things and 264 – 266; Saramago and 255 – 263 Morrison, T. 52, 87 Morss, J. R. 128 – 129, 133, 163, 166, 167 – 168 Nachtraglichkeit 135, 156, 173 Naipaul, V. S. 84 narrative role in psychoanalysis 135 – 136 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC)

306 Index

15, 71 – 72, 73 – 75, 76, 82 – 83, 89, 102 – 103 nature, construction of 97 – 98 neoliberalism 51, 174 neuroscience 18, 141 – 142, 148 – 149, 150 – 151, 168 new materialism 23, 268, 287 – 288, 290 – 292; in childhood/educational studies 206 – 207; decolonial critiques and 207 – 209; Perec and 217 non-child developmental subject, retrieving 179 – 183 Norman rule 45 – 48 objective hate 114 Objecto Quase/The Lives of Things (Saramago) 205, 212; ‘Centaur, The’ story 274 – 275; ‘Chair, The’ story 266 – 269; Child as method, Lives of Things and 278 – 281; ‘Embargo’ story 269 – 271; ‘Reflux’ story 271 – 272; ‘Revenge’ story 275 – 278; ‘Things’ story 272 – 274 object-oriented ontologies (OOO) 127 – 128 observed versus clinical infant 173 – 174 O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo/ The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Saramago) 259 old materialism 209; Saramago and 217 1,001 Critical Days (Leadsom) 151, 152 ‘On Narcissism’ (Freud) 189 ontology 292 othering: honour and 32 – 33; origins of 32; overview of 2, 11 – 12; racialised 14 – 15, 31 Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle/ Workshop for Potential Literature (OuliPo) 217 Pall Mall (magazine) 80 Pankhurst, S. 296 – 297 Parent Infant Foundation 154 – 155 Parent-Infant Psychotherapy (PIP) 152 Paris, M. 45, 50 partial connections 91 Patterson-Kane, E. 73 Paws for kids 87 – 88 Pedersen, H. 285 – 286 Penn, H. 149 – 150 Pequenas Memorias/Small Memories, As (Saramago) 22, 276

Perec, G. 20, 21, 204, 216 – 248; absence and 220; anticolonial commitments 217, 222 – 226; Child as method, Les Choses and 231 – 233; Child as method, Things and 217 – 218, 238 – 243; introduction to 216 – 218; Les Choses/Things 226 – 229; making Child as method material with 294 – 296; material construction/ constraints of 219 – 222; materialism and 210, 211 – 212; matter in writings of 229 – 231; postcard project 218; Quel petit velo a guidon chrome au fond de la cour?/Which moped with chrome-plated bars at the back of the yard? 222 – 226; repetition and citation writing style 218 – 219; Species of spaces and other pieces 220 – 221; on Things 243 – 248; Tunisia in Things 234 – 238; writing styles of 216 – 218 peripheral children 1 Petchesky, R. P. 196 pets and/as children, sentiment and 103 – 106 Phoenix, A. 115 Piaget, J. 37 Pimp My Ultrasound (iPhone app) 145 Pines, N. 33, 44 Piontelli, A. 143 – 144 Piper, H. 73 political economies 51 Politics of Psychoanalysis, The (Frosh) 162 Pontalis, J. B. 160, 221 postcolonialism 14, 21 – 22, 59; childanimal relations and 69, 83 – 88; Child as method and 31 – 32, 222; new materialism 206 – 207; studies 2, 4, 100, 203; see also Perec, G. posthuman 15, 90 – 91, 212; approach to sentiment 96, 109; Lettow diagnoses of 293 – 294; Perec and 216; Saramago and 285 – 286; silly materialism and 289 – 290 Primate Visions (Haraway) 108 prize baby competitions 81 prognosis time 147 psychic economies 51 psychoanalysis: aims of 162; antidevelopmentalism in 17, 127 – 137; as antidevelopmentalist

Index  307

resource 129 – 130; divided subject element of 132 – 133; elements attributed to 131 – 137; historical subject and 134 – 135; integration status and 133 – 134; language and 136; model of logical time and 136 – 137; narrative role in 135 – 136; overview of 127 – 129; unconscious determination element of 131 – 132 psychological culture 52 – 55 psychologisation 16, 82 – 83, 119, 142 Puar, J. K. 147 queer theory 70; Chen and 91 – 92; developmentalism and 146 – 148, 196 – 197; feminist commitment to 2; unconscious and 131 – 132 Quel petit velo a guidon chrome au fond de la cour?/Which moped with chrome-plated bars at the back of the yard? (Perec) 21, 222 – 226 racism 34, 41; blood libel and 14, 42 – 50; Butler texts of 59 – 62; domestic violence and 58; global 182, 194; orientalism and 114; othering and 11, 32; scientific 33, 79, 149; via species-specific animal depictions 85 – 87 Ranger, T. 34 rape rack 108 real child 176 ‘Reflux’ (Saramago) 271 – 272, 279 relational psychoanalysis 174 repetition 135 ‘Revenge’ (Saramago) 275 – 278 Richards, P. 87 Riegel, K. 8 Riley, D. 115 Roberts, J. 145 Romanes, G. 108 Rose, H. 148 – 149 Rose, J. 198 Rose, S. 148 – 149 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) 15, 71, 73, 75, 89, 102 Rustin, M. 182 Sabine, M. 253, 264, 286 Salzani, C. 262 – 263 Sandler, J. 161 – 162

Saramago, J. 20, 22 – 23, 204, 210, 212, 248, 251 – 281; ‘Centaur, The’ story 274 – 275; ‘Chair, The’ story 266 – 269; Child as method, Lives of Things and 278 – 281; childhood philosophy of 255 – 263; ‘Embargo’ story 269 – 271; introduction to 251 – 255; making Child as method material with 294 – 296; materialism of 252 – 255; Objecto Quase/The Lives of Things 263 – 265; ‘Reflux’ story 271 – 272; ‘Revenge’ story 275 – 278; ‘Things’ story 272 – 274; writing style of 216 – 217 Sartre, J. P. 221 sati 56 Scarlatti, D. 252 Schiff Berman, P. 72 – 74, 101 – 102 scouting and guide clubs 81 second nature 98 – 99 Sedgwick, E. K. 147 sentiment 16; affectional speciesist stereotypes and 106 – 108; childmonkey association and 108 – 110; described 96; disciplinary/ methodological positioning for 99 – 101; legal accountabilities for 101 – 103; love, hate and 113 – 117; nature/truth claims and 117 – 119; need for 98 – 99; overview of 96 – 98; pets and/as children and 103 – 106; so truly real™ and 110 – 113 service animals 74 – 75 sexuality 257, 277; blood libel and 54 – 55; psychoanalysis and 171; queer theory and 146 – 147; regulation of girls’ and women’s 40; women’s, preoccupation with 38 – 39 Sfax 228, 234 – 236, 238, 239 – 240, 242 – 243; see also Perec, G. Shulman, G. 182 Shuttleworth, S. 70, 77, 79 – 80, 108 Siege of Lisbon, The (Saramago) 267 silly materialism 23 – 24, 289 – 290 Solymosi, E. 54 Soseki, N. 107 so truly real™ 110 – 113 Sound of Freedom (film) 49 Species of spaces and other pieces (Perec) 220 – 221, 285 specificity 69; need for 98 – 99 Spivak, G. C. 56

308 Index

Stacey, R. 45, 46 – 48 stage 134 – 135, 136 ‘Start for Life offer’ 151 Stavchansky, L. 136, 177 Steedman, C. 55, 75, 76, 113 – 114 Steiner, R. 176 Stephenson, N. 144 – 145 Stern, D. 161, 173 – 174, 175 – 176 Stoler, A. L. 106 Stone Raft, The (Saramago) 253 – 254, 267, 286 Strathern, M. 16, 79, 88 – 89, 91, 97 – 98, 100 – 101, 103 – 104, 105 – 106, 113, 119 structures of feeling 96 – 97 subject-oriented ontologies 127 – 128 Sylvie and Bruno (Dodgson) 70 – 71 Tavistock Clinic 179 – 180 Taylor, A. 98, 100, 104 teachable moment 9 – 10 telegony theory 77 – 78 Things (Perec) see Les Choses/Things (Perec) ‘Things’ (Saramago) 272 – 274, 280 Thomas, G. M. 145 Thomas, K. 106 Todos os Nomes/All the names (Saramago) 258 toxic stress 149 Tracy (comics) 163 trauma 135 Trott, B. 205 Truby King, F. 71 true child 176 Truman, S. E. 295 Tunisia 21; Perec child mentions of 239, 242 – 243, 247; Perec life comparisons with 227 – 228; in Things 234 – 238 Turner, V. 101 – 102 ultrasound 143 – 145; as advanced attachment-based interventions 144; ec-static child and 145 – 146, 147; psychoanalytic research of 143 – 144; rise of, as commercial practice 144 – 145 unconscious determination of psychoanalysis 131 – 132

Un Homme Qui Dort/A Man Asleep (Perec) 216, 221 Urwin, C. 163, 166 Utz, R. 45 – 46, 54 Van de Berg, V. 191 – 192 Vanhoutte, K. K. 262 – 263 Viagem do Elefante/The Elephant, A (Saramago) 284 violence as psychologised and culturalised 41 Viruru, R. 89 – 90 W, or the memory of childhood (Perec) 217 – 218, 220 Walker, A. 87 Walkerdine, V. 163 Ware, V. 90 Washick, B. 290 – 291, 292 Watson, J. 128, 165 – 166 Waugh, B. 83, 89 Wells, H. G. 264 Wheeler, E. 73 Wiegman, R. 147 William of Norwich 43 – 44, 48 Williams, R. 96 – 97 William the Conqueror 46 Wind on the Moon (Linklater) 108 – 109 Wingrove, E. 290 – 291, 292 Winnicott, D. 51, 114 – 116, 154 Winninghoff, A. 155 Wolfe, B. 86 Wolff, P. 174 – 176, 198 women: as children 39 – 41; gendered relations and 32 Women Against Fundamentalism 34 Women’s Social and Political Union 296 World of babies. Imagined childcare guides for eight societies, A (Gottlieb and DeLoache) 193 – 195 Wynter, S. 208, 211 Xenogenesis (Butler) 59 Ypi, L. 6, 19, 191 – 192, 193, 294 Zweig, A. 54