Childhood Innocence: Essence, Education and Performativity more

1 Childhood Innocence: Essence, Education and Performativity Introduction Representations of childhood innocence in modern societies have been identified by scholars as complex moral and epistemological operations, though they appear to be merely a descriptive discourse and attest to the expression in the child of a natural and timeless essence. Baird, for example, writes of a ‘child fundamentalism’ in contemporary society, with appeals to childhood serving as a nearly unassailable form of authoritative political and social discourse, mobilised all too often to defend sectional interests.1 Gordon notes that representations of childhood innocence have had a tendency to be used to support a conservative social agenda, though they give a certain degree of authority to women as mothers and protection to some children. Poor, illegitimate and non-white children, and women outside of traditional roles, are thereby constructed as morally aberrant and not worthy of social or material resources.2 Egan and Hawkes and Faulkner have expressed concern that discourses of innocence, despite seeming to be calls for protection for all children, are in fact used to regulate the national population. These discourses make child sexuality a source of medical and moral concern. They note that social interventions made in the name of innocence more often than not result in the protection of the idea of childhood, rather than helping children to live and flourish.3 These scholars have each called for further critical work on the topic of childhood innocence. In response to these calls, my aim in this text is to offer a social theoretical account of discourses of childhood innocence. The protection for the vulnerable demanded by innocence discourses can be of immense social benefit. However it may be attainable by other means. Discourses of childhood innocence seem to have an unimpeachable moral status. Yet scrutiny of these discourses indicates that they should in fact be regarded as a potentially exclusionary form of social practice, linked to little-acknowledged and problematic social effects. I will begin by examining the vivid utopian/dystopian depictions of Frank Wedekind’s text Mine-Haha.4 This text will be used to make visible the social exclusion, stratification and normalisation that 2 attend everyday discourses of innocent childhood in modern Western societies, which I shall then go on to theorise. This analysis will be initiated through a consideration of themes of deviance and innocence in Foucault’s The Abnormal lectures.5 Foucault argues that since the nineteenth century representations of normality and abnormality have articulated with discourses on childhood in operating and mandating apparatuses of governmentality. Modern childhood has been constructed as the essential proximity of normal children to an ideal of innocence; the position of innocence at the biographical origin of the human subject has served as a principle for separating between normal and abnormal forms of behaviour and subjectivity. The former are constructed as cultivated forms of this imputed natural essence. The latter are constructed as degrees towards monstrosity – both corrupted and corrupting. Building from this analysis of Wedekind and Foucault, it will be argued that modern childhood has been constructed as both natural and in need of cultivation and regulation. Through practices which seem to protect and nurture innocence, a particular account of the ‘natural purity’ of children can be materially and discursively produced without this seeming to be an artificial imposition. Moreover, I shall propose that imputing innocence to children allows a covert ontology to be constructed for particular groups of adults or society more generally; claims about the nature of the particular groups of adults, or society generally, can be smuggled into such accounts via claims about the child they may once have been. I shall depict innocence discourses as socially complex and as complicit in the production, stabilisation and occlusion of potentially troubling effects on relations of power, emotion and meaning in modern societies. Innocence as normalisation Frank Wedekind was an early twentieth-century German social critic and writer. His text Mine-Haha gives an account of the education received by a group of affluent girls at a boarding-school from the perspective of one of the girls, the protagonist Hidalla. The social arrangements of sequestration and cultivation described in Mine-Haha are exaggerated forms of those that are available to culturally 3 and materially affluent children in modern Western societies; its continued contemporary relevance is illustrated by its adaptation by Hadzihalilovic as a successful film, Innocence, in 2004, and by its translation into English in 2010. As Adorno has argued, the microscopic attention of Mine-Haha to the processes that animate these arrangements of cultural sequestration and cultivation make it a nearly unmatched account of some of the most insidious aspects of Western modernity.6 This is linked to the utopian/dystopian framing of the text. A by-product of Wedekind’s close attention to the girls as each a ‘masterpiece of nature’ in their subjectivity and embodiment,7 is that his text shows how this apparently natural essence is in fact dependent on cultural training rather than preceding it: She hitched her dress up so high that we could see her legs above the knees and showed us how one should walk... She raised her knee a little and brought the foot down, toe first; then she slowly let the heel down, but not before the back of the foot to the big toe had formed a straight line with the shinbone. Her full, round but delicately formed knee stretched out at the very moment that her heel touched the ground... She had her cane continually on our toes, under our knees or under our calves, lest one of us was about to let her foot down too quickly.8 Boa captures Mine-Haha well when she writes that Wedekind’s ‘utopia’ realises itself as a ‘voyeuristic and sadomasochistic fantasy. The combination produces a text which contradicts itself and attacks the desires it asserts’.9 Trotsky notes dryly that, among its other failings and contradictions as a utopia, Wedekind’s system as a model of education would result in the unsustainable overproduction of ballet dancers:10 the classes in the boarding school are solely those that ‘bind the spirit to the body’ as an integral and graceful whole: gymnastics, music and dance.11 The girls spend the rest of their time playing in the wide gardens of the school, ‘one as happy as the next, but that is all we were’ since ‘nothing startled us from the monotony’.12 The boundaries of the clean and natural pre-pubescent body are, in this way, aligned by the boundaries of the innocent subject as a form of being 4 expressing solely essence, such that ‘when someone said ‘I’, she always meant to refer to her whole being, from head to toe’.13 There must be a perfect correspondence between the emerging subject and the biological matter that comprises their body, in order that their experience, identity and agency can seem to be the outcome solely of their natural essence. This proximity is affirmed in the text by the insistent reverberation of animal metaphors to designate different identities. Distance or the loss of innocence is thus constructed as a fall from essence, attended by feelings of loss and of brokenness. On reaching puberty, Hidalla wonders how this ‘detested’, ‘swelling’ bodily ‘flesh’ is ‘supposed to be me’.14 Transgression of the rules that ensure this enculturation result, the protagonist is led to believe, in a ‘slave existence’ as servants to future girls. The servants must keep the environment of the girls clean, cook for them, and wash their bodies to ensure ‘dazzlingly white skin’ ([1903] 2010: 28). Each ‘repulsive’ and ‘awful creature’ is said by the girls to have become old and ugly because they have never left the school, turning into impure incarnations of nature in the absence of effective cultivation by the school and later by (masculine) society ([1903] 2010: 26-7). The servants’ lives have no legal standing: they can be killed without consequence. Abandonment to this vulnerable and violable status is threatened, as a possibility, should the girls fail to accept the regime of enculturation that trains them in innocence. As Agamben (2008) has argued in Il Sacramento del Linguaggio, when agents are threatened with placement in this liminal zone between society and nature, stripped of rights and protection, this indicates that what is at stake is the policing of a norm that is aiming to impose a contingent definition of the human being as an ostensive ontology. This contingency can be seen in the disavowed practical forms and processes that are present, even in the authorised subject-position of the innocent pupil. Fleeting intimate encounters occur between the pupils, in which a whole range of disallowed emotions are expressed, ranging from rage to sexual desire. Even though the result of these encounters tends to be the successful realignment of the subject with the norm of innocence, the reader glimpses a vocabulary and set of practices passed down the generations of girls, which subsist in the gap between training and subjectivity. This 5 gap is ritually instantiated and managed in the annual competition between the girls to be chosen as the best dancer by the headmistress. However, the most visible presence in the school of ostensibly disavowed forms of agency are the nightly theatre productions, performed by the older pupils on the cusp of puberty, for an audience of hidden, anonymous male spectators.15 The costumes the girls wear are often ‘translucent’ or do ‘nothing to prevent the whole body from being visible’. The audience, ‘drunk on lust’, ‘howl’ with ‘approval’ at the performances, particularly when the actors touch one another or mime adult sexual roles.16 It is the revenue from these productions that cover the running costs of the entire school. The older the children become, the more they realise that the theatre is ‘why we’re learning’ grace and innocence, and why they are given responsibility for training the younger children in this form of subjectivity in turn.17 The protagonist feels distress, a ‘deadly fright’, when her body is critically assessed by two members of the audience. Yet this fright is not initiated by the intrusion of adult sexuality into a previously untarnished purity, as a split in a homogenous and originary innocent subjectivity. Rather, its cause lies in the way these critical comments make the girl see that the ideal against which she is being measured has long been the identity she has been trained to cultivate in herself by the culture of the school. 18 The split in the subject that innocence cannot countenance is, in fact, ensured by its operation since the girls learn to ‘think with our hips’ as the very principle of innocent embodiment. This training serves to separate sexuality from autonomy, such that the girls can ‘offer up’ their bodies with ‘real pleasure’ to assessment against the ideal.19 The pupils of the school have been prepared for their subordinated role in the middle-class Western family, responsible for servicing the bodily and emotional life of the masculine citizen and children as future citizens. They are not taught the skills to be agents in modern society, such as the ability to read or write; the protagonist recognises herself as ‘utterly different’ from the other ‘women who had been brought up with me’ by virtue of her position as the author-function of a text. 20 Instead, as Whalley has documented with regards Wedekind’s female characters more generally, the women raised in the utopian boarding school have been trained to offer the masculine subject a source of redemptive meaning, support and satisfaction – in the 6 twilight of other forms of redemption in modernity – that will maintain them as docile and productive citizens.21 Innocence appears to be the mere expression of a neutral and universal essence attached to childhood. In fact, however, it is a covert and normalising training. Only those forms and processes that will contribute to the embodiment of an ideal modern adulthood – socially, ethnically, morally, economically, sexually, culturally – are treated as unmarked characteristics of innocence. It is these that lead the public to respond to innocence with an ‘endless sea of flags and pennants’, attaching such value to innocence that those assessed by this iron imperative become ‘really afraid’22. Yet social forms and processes that are seen to have no place in childhood are present, in disavowed form, in the very operation of innocence as a training. Their activity is naturalised and legitimated, and innocence is produced as the expression of essence, by the practical apparatuses through which the impure is discursively and materially separated from the pure. The innocent child is thus ‘exposed, in the cruellest sense of the word’ to corruption already threatening or already present.23 Deviance and innocence in Foucault’s The Abnormal In Wedekind’s work, feminine adolescence makes visible the tensions attendant upon the social production of innocent subjectivity. My first step in analysing this imbrication of innocence discourses and subjectivity will be to consider Foucault’s investigation of these themes. Foucault historicises innocence discourses, and traces the way they have come to serve the normalising effects identified and valorised by Wedekind. In The Abnormal, Foucault’s investigation is framed by the investigation of three discursive figures, which ‘came together in the nineteenth century to give rise to the domain of abnormality that gradually overlays them, appropriates them’: the human monster, the individual in need of correction, and the masturbating child.24 The earliest of the figures to appear in Western society was the human monster, who first appeared as the homo sacer of Roman Law, an individual included within the social norm only as its exception: ‘The monster is a breach of the law that 7 automatically stands outside the law’.25 The moral monster, Foucault suggests, has always been understood to be present in any case where there is ‘the transgression of natural limits’.26 The human monster is paradoxically both ‘impossible and forbidden’. The monster thus traces the constitutive ‘limit’ of modern biological law and juridical law, to which the norm is not able to give a response. 27 Exceptional, extra-legal responses are necessitated. Yet at the same time, ‘the monster is a principle of intelligibility in spite of its limit position’, acting as the catastrophic end-point of any unnatural drive in the human being.28 The monster ‘is the magnifying model, the form of every little irregularity exhibited by the games of nature. In this sense we can say that the monster is the major model of every little deviation’.29 The threat posed by the figure of the monster mandates the surveillance and regulation of individuals, to ensure the correspondence of the human being with his or her true nature. Whereas the monster emerged at the point of intersection between law and biology, the individual to be corrected as a discursive figure is facilitated by the intersection between the family and the state apparatuses of social regulation and optimisation.30 What primarily characterises this discursive figure is both the need and the capacity of expert institutions to submit them successfully to normalisation, testing for ‘pure’ or ‘impure’ forms of being and desire.31 If the human monster is the constitutive maximum limit of the spectrum of abnormality as deviation and, the masturbating child is positioned as the constitutive minimum limit, then the individual to be corrected characterises the space in between.32 However, the framing of abnormality as the difference exhibited by a human from what is natural for humans, necessitates an explanation as to how nature could produce an unnatural drive from within itself, how identity with essence could turn into dissolute and abnormal forms of subjectivity. This question, as we have seen, simultaneously animates and haunts every description of the ‘natural’ innocence of the girls in Wedekind Mine-Haha. Foucault’s genealogy indicates that in the history of Western societies, sexuality was assigned primary responsibility for this potential split between the subject and his or her identity and volition, a fall from an imputed Edenic state where these were aligned. Sexuality came to be associated with a split between consciousness and that which ‘never emerges into self-consciousness’33. Masturbation 8 in turn was problematised, because it exhibited within itself the minimal difference from the ideal of innocence as complete identity with homogenous and originary essence – a split of a single body into a difference between the toucher and the touched. Masturbation repeats a touch, a contamination by difference, that must have come from outside the innocent child, since something unnatural could not, by definition, be understood to have ‘an endogenous causality’.34 Innocence, as an originary and homogeneous essence, could not have produced such a difference from inside itself, and nor could it be presumed to have come via the natural relationship between the child and their parents. Thus ‘servants, governesses, private tutors, uncles, aunts and cousins will all come between the parent’s virtue and the child’s natural innocence and introduce a dimension of perversion’.35 Foucault contends that medical and parental discourses regarding the threat posed by deviation from the natural were underpinned by an account of sexuality as an ever-present danger to and within childhood. As a result, ‘it is through childhood that psychiatry succeeded in getting hold of the adult and the totality of the adult’.36 Whereas in the pre-modern period, innocence discourses operated mainly within a religious register, with the emergence of the modern family and discourses on normality the primary figure embodying innocence became the bourgeois child. As Wedekind illustrates, the child became identified with an ideal of full and undivided presence, and identity with nature. In this way, Foucault argues, ‘the Christian flesh is transposed into the family element’ as the principle of the family’s immediate governance by parents and its ultimate governance by the social and medical apparatuses of the state.37 Childhood innocence was therefore fundamental in creating the modern subject-position of the protective social authority. This authority was tasked with the surveillance, protection and regulation of individuals, each in possession of a sexuality and a character organised by the interplay of purity and impurity as possibilities.38 In a later interview, Foucault proposed that since the 1970s, the figure of the monster as the ultimate form of abnormality has been identified with the sexual desire for innocent children. Though otherwise strikingly the same as the nineteenth century discourses on innocent childhood, this new discursive positioning of children has 9 intensified the ability of institutional apparatuses ‘to intervene twice’. On the one hand, this new discourse allowed authorities to monitor and supervise children to prevent internal difference from their own imputed essence. On the other hand, it permitted the monitoring and supervision of the ‘virgin’ ‘territory’ of child sexuality in its vulnerability to external threat.39 The innocence of the bourgeois child of the nineteenth century has subsequently come to be attached more generally to those classified as the nation’s children, producing the historical continuity that renders Wedekind’s account evocatively current. Innocence is theorised by Foucault as a discursive apparatus for the governance of the wider population through purifying, protecting, nurturing and normalising of childhood, education/enculturation and sexuality.40 Like the monster, the protective authority is also positioned as distant from the natural essence represented by childhood. Yet the protector is discursively constructed as a supersession and cultivated form of the natural origin, rather than as an unnatural deviation. This cultivation sets out to attach the instincts to the objects the norm designates as proper, producing the cultivated citizen as relatively pure despite their distance from the originary essence. To the extent that normative behaviour is coded as pure as part of its establishment as a social norm, Foucault’s work indicates that this is an effect of the discursive construction of acceptable desires as cultivated forms of a homogenous and originary natural human essence. In this regard then, innocence discourses can be theorised as enacting a separation between those processes that it deems pure and natural and those that it deems impure and corrupting. It produces a symbolic and practical separation between three subject-positions: those classified as apiece with an originary essence (coded as pure); those considered as successfully cultivated subjects (coded as relatively pure); and those classified as deviant (coded as impure). Innocence and performativity Childhood innocence has come to mean correspondence with an originary natural essence. Yet this seemingly transparent relationship between phenomena and 10 essence, as a substantive quality, can be theorised in light of Foucault’s work as a discursive strategy of biopolitics in modern societies. The cultural and governmental apparatuses that support this discourse range from child protection institutions through to legal distinctions between civil minority and full responsible citizenship. These apparatuses have spread representations of innocent childhood, as they have been globalised and selectively reconstituted in dialogue with local cultural forms. To take an example: In post-colonial India, coexisting with theories that posit that children bring with them memories of a previous life, are modernist discourses that conceive of childhood in terms of a linear progression into sovereign adult/subjecthood. These modernist constructions of childhood reveal a tendency to think of children as 'uncontaminated' by the temporal world in which they live and, therefore, as a space of purity.41 Just as Wedekind’s text revealed, perhaps despite itself, Foucault’s work indicates that the natural essence to which the modern innocent child corresponds is made possible through the activity of the discourses themselves as ongoing practical processes, rather than merely being represented by this activity. Innocence discourses in modern society can therefore be described as performative, in part producing the representations that they appear to simply designate. As Derrida and Butler have shown, the performative is only ever an ongoing process, since it never manages to shape subjectivity or power-relations absolutely to produce a final and stable precipitate.42 In this regard innocence is perhaps best conceptualised as a discursive ‘resource’, drawn upon reflexively in the course of situated social action. It provides a particular frame of intelligibility for particular phenomena in the world, the individual or collective actor who mobilises them, their relationship with other discourses, and the meanings attached to different forms of their own use. Not all appeals to innocence as a discursive resource will be successful as social strategies, or turn out quite as planned. They may not even always be intelligible acts. Incumbent discourses on innocence can potentially be expropriated and transformed, depending on the 11 practical relations that organise a given situation. There is significant variation in how innocence discourses are mobilised in contemporary Western societies, and there has similarly been significant historical variation across the modern period. Despite these qualifications, however, certain regularities can be theorised in how modern discourses of innocence shape different forms of subjectivity, and intervene in arrangements of power, emotion and meaning.43 More specifically, the way innocence as the essence of childhood is performatively achieved is through the moral and epistemological devaluation of some of the processes that are required to bring the innocent child into social existence. Innocence discourses permit a ‘natural essence’ to be performatively constructed, without this seeming to be an artificial imposition, by classifying some of the practical means through which it is socially and materially constructed as inessential. Innocence can thereby seem to be the happy but threatened result of an expression of originary and homogenous essence – rather than dependent on the intersecting and reflexive agency of different social agents, and material processes, positioned in space and time by relations of power, emotion and meaning. As Wedekind’s Mine-Haha makes painfully visible, innocence discourses are organised by subtle symbolic boundaries in the child’s everyday agency and subjectivity which manage this tension. These symbolic boundaries designate as impure those phenomena that would undermine the fidelity of the child to an imputed essence, through the intrusion of elements heterogeneous, foreign or inferior to this essence. In contemporary Western societies, the forms and processes that are seen to corrupt innocence are those that are presumed to cause a split in the subjectivity and agency of the child, breaching the originary homogeneity associated with their innocence. Innocence is therefore produced, performatively, through the classification of phenomena into those that impinge upon it and those that do not. This can be seen, for example, in Foucault’s analysis of discourse on masturbation, where childhood is constructed as identity with a homogenous and originary natural essence, through a discourse on the dissolution and splitting of a child’s subjectivity. Though the classificatory process separating between the essential and the inessential appears to be the effect of innocence as an essence of childhood prior to the operation of 12 discourse, it is in fact through this discursive process that innocent and non-innocent subjects are produced. In particular, in modern societies childhood innocence has been constructed such that it is understood to have been destroyed when the child comes to assess the possible uses of their embodiment as an organisation of physical or social force. Whilst other forms of experience, knowledge or desire can also breach the homogeneity and departs from the origin to which innocence corresponds, calculations regarding embodiment have an unusual privilege. They are understood to always cause such a breach through producing a split in the subject, between calculator and calculated. We can, for example, follow Faulkner in taking conflict, labour and desire as instances of practical processes that are seen as outside of the essence of childhood, but are nonetheless present in its material and social construction.44 Within innocence discourses, and their positioning and production of different types of subject, these processes become differentially marked morally and epistemologically. On the one hand, fighting for the innocent child’s rights, working for their happiness, and desiring their well-being, are taken as morally laudable. They justify strong regimes of protection and nurturance. In these cases innocence plays the role of a discursive referent, appealed to but not directly acted upon by the verb. Mediation allows it to remain ostensibly untouched by the multiplicity and temporality that the verb depends upon for its very operation. On the other hand, fighting children, working children or desiring children – or those with sustained experience or agency in contexts ‘riven’ by conflict, labour or desire – are less likely to be discursively understood as true innocents. This contamination in the present does not preclude the assessment and governance of these children, with reference to an ideal innocence which naturally should be theirs but which has been lost. However, as the figures on sexual assault and social services responses indicate for example, in their distance from innocence these children may be constructed as less deserving of the protections, resources and care that are due those children with a ‘childhood’.45 Innocence serves as what Barth and Armstrong have termed a ‘border guard’ 46 – it acts to draw qualitative distinctions and set symbolic boundaries, in the name of a cultural or biological essence, between subject-positions and group-categories that 13 would otherwise be recognised as on a continuum with one another. Innocence is not utilised primarily to ascribe purity to the childhood of the most culturally and materially affluent, since this rarely comes into question given their stockpile of other signs of cultivation. Rather, as a performative rather than constative discourse – producing social effects rather than merely describing reality – innocence serves to organise the social and symbolic boundaries of the individual, family, community or nation. Lawler, for example, has documented that discourses of childhood innocence have proliferated in British society in proportion to the increasing fluidity of the boundary between middle-class and working-class status. Innocence is deployed as an emotive discursive repertoire to buttress and police middle-class norms for those whose social status is made vulnerable by this social change.47 Yet, in response, cultural elites not only treat emotive appeals to childhood innocence as unnecessary, but in fact position ‘hysteria’ about threats to innocence as a signifier of lower-middle class status.48 Those placed on the far side of the categorical line enacted by innocence discourses, such as non-white, immigrant or working class children, tend to be understood in state and public discourses to have diverged already from their own innocence by virtue of the uncivilised and inferior environment in which they were raised. Children brought up in family or community environments constructed by public discourses as uncivilised and inferior compared to the national culture, are not seen to be capable of remaining in their originary and essential state: Unrestrained and undeveloped by the ameliorating institutions of childhood, the innocence of children is perverted and twisted. In these stories, children are represented as malicious predators, the embodiment of dangerous natural forces... excess populations to be eliminated, while others must be controlled, reshaped, and harnessed to changing social ends.49 To remain as a representation of true and proper childhood, any conflict, labour and desire, for instance, in which the child is directly implicated must always remain 14 classed as play. It is constructed as an expression of the child’s innocence and authenticity, leaving this originary state unaffected. No split or heterogeneity may be introduced within the homogenous subjectivity of the innocent child, without separating that child from the properties that are understood to essentially characterise childhood. The figure of the child is placed as an expression of a natural essence that needs to be supplemented by total enclosure within the protection and control of cultivated culture, and nourished by the correct processes of (parental, institutional, post/colonial) training. In this way, the material conditions that lead particular subjects to occupy a tacit hierarchy of subject-positions as identities are at once legitimated and hidden – by the invocation of figures embodying innocence or corruption, purity or impurity. For instance, children learn to manage and regulate their bodies as organic and social matter in appropriate ways through an ungainly and oft-messy process. This process is occluded by representations of the body of the innocent child as moving within a protected domestic or natural environment, elegant and self-contained, articulating their essence within time and space as graceful movement. Perhaps the central scene of Hadzihalilovic’s screen adaptation and interpretation of Wedekind’s Mine-Haha is a long scene of the children playing in a glade; it addresses the wider cultural narrative of childhood as a glade or garden protected and closed off from the adult world.50 The play in the glade, in the light of the later discovery by the viewer of the theatre, become re-signified and re-valued by Hadzihalilovic. It comes to signify an ongoing training, oriented towards the forms of graceful and innocent embodiment demanded by a paying audience, by the viewer of the film perhaps, and ultimately by relations of power in society more generally. As a servant tells Bianca, one of the girls, following her last performance at the theatre: ‘You will know how to make use of your legs outside’. Bianca asks her teacher on the train out of the school, ‘What will happen to us?’, to which the reply is that ‘One thing is certain, you’ll forget us’. The cultural training in innocence will become, even for the girls themselves, the normalising and naturalising outside and ground of their adult embodiment and subjectivity. 15 Innocence and citizenship Innocence discourses can be treated as operating as what Berlant has termed a cultural ‘paramnesia’: an image that organises experience and memory such that it ‘veils, without simply suppressing knowledge of, the means by which the nation’s hegemonic contradictions and contingencies are constructed, consented to, displaced, and replaced by images of normal culture’.51 The innocence attributed to children can be understood to give social apparatuses legitimate grapple on particular members of society or on the population more generally, in their biological, economic, semiotic, and social potentialities. This is above all the case for women, for whom distance from innocence may be problematised and policed as a deviation from their natural essence. Among its other roles in modern society, innocence as an unworldly quality justifies the role of the citizen as worldly social authority. And the redemptive quality attached to innocence clears the authority of guilt caused by individual feelings of lack in the face of judging ideals. An interesting peculiarity of innocence is that it is an external source of consecration: those who hold the quality of innocence do not and must not (yet) be the ones to be placed in social dominance. Though the child is a body external to the citizen, the legal minor is symbolically and legally included within the identity of a protector, who is constituted as such not by any substantive quality of their own, but by activity vis-à-vis the minor: The government of men is a practice which is not imposed by those who govern on those who are governed, but a practice that fixes the definition and respective positions of the governed and governors facing each other and in relation to each other.52 In placing the child as the property of the protector, as normal and acceptable citizen, the split in the modern subject between their present and their proper form can be temporarily closed and reconciled. In Foucault’s account we saw that if the modern individual comes to signify the presence of deviant forms of being and desire, then they, by degrees, approach a state 16 of monstrosity and become a potential threat to innocence. However, if the adult individual takes responsibility for themselves and the child by finding meaning and pleasure in combating forces coded as impure and by preserving/cultivating untouched sources of purity, then propriety is performatively asserted. The social authority is thereby consecrated as relatively pure. As Trotter has discerned, ‘If to grow up is to become at once adequately illusioned and adequately disillusioned, then mess would appear to occupy a prominent place on both sides of the account’.53 The disruption of subjective and embodied purity occasions adulthood, but proper adulthood is spent attempting to defend the nation, community and those individuals in their care against threatening and impure heterogeneity, foreignness or inferiority. The legal minor that the citizen once was and for whom responsibility needs to be taken is not therefore merely a supplementary element of their political and experiential identity, but rather a constitutive outside. It serves as a site for smuggling ideals regarding the natural essence of the human being into social discourses, thereby establishing social imperatives linking an innocent legal minor, an impure and malevolent threatening force, and the subject-position of the citizen who personally contains elements of both but who is also held responsible for policing the line between the two. If, as Baird and Faulkner have observed, in contemporary neoliberal society there has been an intensification of appeals to childhood innocence as a form of moral authority,54 the role played by innocence discourse in constituting and policing the ostensibly autonomous and self-responsible citizen may be of significance. A category of people who can legitimately not be held accountable can be deployed to construct and police a category of self-regulating and responsible citizens, who may only appeal to innocence and reprieve from responsibility under special conditions – such as victimisation, deprivation, mental illness. On the one hand, this purificatory activity is conducted in the name of the need to protect or achieve the pure ideal in the present, since distance from the ideal is presumed to reflect the work of malevolent forces. On the other hand, it is also legitimated by the imperative to ensure the future biological and cultural reproduction of the individual, family or population. Yet what this reproduction takes to be its object is not the variegated present, but the individual, family or population in their 17 ostensive and unachievable true and proper form. This pure form ostensibly stands as the unchanging ground of national identity – as a discrete, but also internally variegated, truth – ever deferred from the present.55 Reproduction of the nation as an ostensive essence is therefore ever a profoundly gendered enterprise of regulation and optimisation vis-à-vis a past or future ideal of purity. Innocence may serve to naturalise social stratification and symbolic boundaries, entitling individuals and groups differentially to economic resources and state protections. Moreover, appeals to innocence can operate as a practical apparatus for the social regulation and optimisation of biopower – the social and physical forces of the population. Such power relations are not simply bad, and are capable of immensely beneficial effects in justifying resources and care for those in need. However, innocence discourses require scrutiny: in their invocation of essence, they can serve as powerful and emotive tools for smuggling otherwise dubious assumptions into the stratification and regulation of human lives. Conclusion: beyond Purity and Danger In modern innocence discourses, the homogenous is discursively framed as originary and valuable compared to the heterogeneous. As a result, social deviation is aligned with biological and physical dirt since difference from the origin is thereby identified with the intrusion of heterogeneous, foreign or inferior elements into a pristine essence.56 Innocence discourses thus map a distinction between homogeneity and heterogeneity onto a distinction between originary and deviant. The former tends to be privileged over the latter, as more true and proper. Regulatory practices are thereby mandated, under the rubric of hygiene, to ensure that such sources of contamination, coded as dirty or dark, are set apart, regulated, and made use of – and that purity, coded as clean and white, is protected and cultivated, such that its inevitable loss results only in civilised subjects. The biopolitical forces of the population are thereby inserted into apparatuses that differentially protect, optimise and normalise individuals and groups, through discourses of innocence as a threatened object in need of social protection and cultivation. 18 There are always already comparatively heterogeneous, foreign, or inferior elements within any subject or their environment. Innocence discourse contains this tension within it, and rather than undermining innocence as a representation, it precisely gives the discourse its social significance. This can be seen in the Oxford English Dictionary definition of how innocence as a term is used: innocence is treated as floating between ‘freedom from specific guilt’, and the absence of ‘moral wrong in general’ as a substantive ‘quality or fact’. The gap between the object and referent of innocence discourse makes available a powerful call to action. Innocence discourses strategically mobilise this gap to produce a narrative in which dangers to the child, family or nation are always but a single step removed from the present. Mary Douglas famously argued in Purity and Danger that ‘dirt is matter out of place’: the dirtiness that threatens a pure state is an expression of social anxiety associated with the breach of a general and stable social or cognitive norm. 57 I would contend, by contrast, that dirtiness can better be conceptualised as a strategically mobilised representation. It signifies the constitutive distance of a phenomenon from a natural purity that has been placed – performatively – as the intrinsic property of a subject or of reality. This distance is not a secondary intrusion that disturbs or threatens to disturb a primary purity: it necessarily runs through discourses that appeal to innocence from the very first, serving to facilitate their deployment as a potentially powerful social practice. The discursive ascription of innocence to childhood serves to legitimise associated with claims about human ontology. It can help manage the social, material and discursive tensions that attend such claims. Placing childhood as a pre-social and natural period at the foundation of every human being facilitates moral and epistemological discourses about the ground and ideal for human life and the national community. The individual, the family and the national population can thereby be placed under an injunction to engage in practical regimes of cultivation, regulation and purification – where the pure is identified with the imputed essence. The modern citizen is placed by innocence discourse in a position suspended between purity and impurity, by virtue of their constitutive distance from innocence. They are able to recuperate this dangerous distance by taking responsibility for nurturing and 19 normalising themselves and innocents, enacting mechanisms of biopolitical regulation and optimisation on behalf, ultimately, of the state. It is my contention that innocence does not express a prior and pure essence, but rather produces such representations performatively, through the separation of the pure and natural from the impure and corrupting. It can therefore be understood as a discourse constructing a relationship between subjectivities and their essence through relations of power, emotion and meaning, whilst at the same time to a degree effacing the signs of this process of construction. As the analysis of Wedekind’s Mine-Haha set out to make visible and troubling, in modern societies innocence discourses can be mobilised to serve to protect and cultivate some, but also operate powerful mechanisms of social exclusion, stratification and normalisation. For my part, I suspect that we can – and perhaps will best – grant resources and care to those in need by avoiding the essentialising narrative of purity and danger contained in appeals to innocence. 1 Barbara Baird ‘Child Politics, Feminist Analysis’ Australian Feminist Studies 23, 57 (2008): 291Linda Gordon ‘The Perils of Innocence, or What's Wrong with Putting Children First’ The Journal of Danielle Egan & Gail Hawkes ‘The Problem with Protection’ Continuum, 23, 3 (2009): 389-400, 305 2 the History of Childhood and Youth 1, 3 (2008): 331-350 3 and Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (London: Palgrave 2010); Joanne Faulkner The Importance of Being Innocent (Cambridge: CUP 2010). 4 Frank Wedekind Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, trans. Philip Ward, Michel Foucault The Abnormal, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Picador [1975] 2003) Theador Adorno Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, (London: Athlone [1970] 1999) Wedekind, ‘Mine-Haha’ p.14 Ibid. p.8; compare Frigga Haug et al. ([1983] 1987) Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Elizabeth Boa, The Sexual Circus: Widekind’s Theatre, (Oxford: Blackwell 1987), p. 196 Leon Trotsky ‘Frank Wedekind: Esthetics and Eroticism’, trans. David Thorstad, Boston Wedekind, ‘Mine-Haha’ p.16 Ibid. p.33 Ibid. p.34 Ibid. p.51 Compare Butler ‘Bodies that Matter’, particularly the essay ‘Gender is Burning’, on theatricality Wedekind, ‘Mine-Haha’ p. 43-5, 57 Ibid. p.25 Ibid. p.44 Ibid. p.9, 38 Ibid. p.57 Fred Whalley The Elusive Transcendent: The Role of Religion in the Plays of Frank Wedekind, (London: Hesperus [1903] 2010) 5 6 p.13 7 8 Memory, trans. Erica Carter, NY: Verso 9 10 University Journal, 23 ([1908] 1975): 44 11 12 13 14 15 as a rendering visible of the way culture is naturalised as essence by social practices. 16 17 18 19 20 21 (Bern: Peter Lang 2002); cf. Frank Wedekind Lulu, trans. Nicholas Wright & Wes Williams, (London: Nick Hern , F. [1891, 1904] 2001) 22 23 24 25 Wedekind ‘Mine-Haha’ p.59 Ibid. p.60 Foucault, ‘Abnormal’, p.55 Ibid. p.56, 63; cf. Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer, trans Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford Foucault, ‘Abnormal’, p.63; cf. Michel Foucault The Order of Things (London: Routledge [1966] University Press, [1995a] 1998) 26 1989) p.171 27 28 29 30 Foucault, ‘Abnormal’, p.56 Ibid. p.57 Ibid. p.56 Ibid. p.57; cf. Michel Foucault Psychiatric Power, trans. Graham Burchell, (NY: Picador [1974] See Michel Foucault ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self’ in Religion and Foucault, ‘Abnormal’, p.58 Ibid. pp.157-9; Cf. Robbie Duschinsky (2011) ‘Augustine, Rousseau, and the Idea of Childhood’ Foucault, ‘Abnormal’, p.242 Ibid. p.244 Ibid. p.304 Ibid. p.263 Ibid. p. 87; Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (NY: Penguin Michel Foucault ‘Sexual Morality and the Law’ in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Cf. Michel Foucault Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin [1976] Purnima Mankekar 'To Whom Does Ameena Belong?' Towards a Feminist Analysis of Childhood Jacques Derrida ‘Signature, Event, Context’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: Chicago University Press [1971] 1982); Judith Butler Bodies that Matter (London: 2006) pp.81-2 31 Culture, ed. Jeremy R Carrette, (Manchester: Manchester University Press [1980] 1999), p.176 32 33 Heythrop Journal 51 (5) 34 35 36 37 38 [1976] 1978) p.153 39 Kritzman, (London: Routledge [1978] 1988) p.276, 281 40 2003) p.258 41 and Nationhood in Contemporary India, Feminist Review 56 (1997) p.58. 42 Routledge 1993). 43 Cf. Stanley Hall ‘Who Needs ‘Identity’?’ in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall & Paul Faulkner, ‘Importance of Being Innocent’, p.76 Du Gay, (London: SAGE 1996); Vikki Bell Culture & Performance (Oxford: Berg 2007). 44 45 See e.g. Jeanne Gregory & Sue Lees, Policing Sexual Assault, (London: Routledge 1999); Patrick Ayre & David Barrett (2000) ‘Young People and Prostitution: An end to the beginning?’ Childhood & Society, 14: 48-59 46 Fredrik Barth ‘Introduction’ in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, (Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1969); Stephanie Lawler ‘Mobs and Monsters: Independent Man meets Paulsgrove Woman’ Feminist John Armstrong Nations Before Nationalism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1982). 47 Theory 3, 1 (2002): 103–13; ‘Disgusted Subjects: the making of middle-class identities’ Sociological Review 53, 3 (2005): 429-446. 48 Cf. Abigail Bray ‘Governing the Gaze: Child Sexual Abuse Moral Panics and the Post-Feminist Blind Spot’ Feminist Media Studies 9, 2 (2009): 173-191 49 Sharon Stephens ‘Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism’’ in Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995), p.13 50 See Emma Wilson ‘Miniature Lives, Intrusion and Innocence: Women Filming Children’ French Cultural Studies 18, 2 (2007): 169-183 51 Lauren Berlant The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, (Durkham: Duke University Press 1995), p.57 52 Michel Foucault The Birth of Biopolitics, (London: Palgrave [1979] 1984); see e.g. David Buckingham & Sara Bragg Young People, Sex and the Media, (London: Palgrave 2004) 53 David Trotter Cooking With Mud: the idea of mess in nineteenth-century art and fiction, (Oxford: Baird, ‘Child Politics’ pp.300-4; Faulkner ‘The Importance of Being Innocent’, passim Cf. Nira Yuval-Davis Gender & Nation, (London: SAGE 1997) ; Irene Gedalof Against Purity, Cf. Richard Dyer White: Essays on Race and Culture, (London: Routledge 1997) Mary Douglas Purity and Danger, (London: Routledge 1966), p.44 OUP 2000) p.2 54 55 (London : Routledge 1999) 56 57