File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9806, message 120


Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 08:14:45 +1000 (EST)
From: Christopher Mcmahon <Christopher.Mcmahon-AT-jcu.edu.au>
Subject: Re: deleuzian lord of the flies


Thanks for these thoughts:

Have you read K. Oe's "Nip the buds, shoot the children?"

- Chris 

On Mon, 15 Jun 1998 Unleesh-AT-aol.com wrote:

> A friend of mine recently was describing the behavior of her sister's infant
> son and asking me whether it was normal, indicating it wasn't an aggressive
> move at all. "He likes to pull hair and scratch faces", all the time, even
> when not apparently angry. I replied, "it's probably an enjoyable interaction
> for him." I paused and wondered, "What would it be like if those behaviors
> were not culled out of children? What would a world of adults be like where
> these spontaneous behaviors of childhood were not actively discouraged? What
> would happen if we either turned the filters off or radically changed our
> selection criteria? It's interesting to imagine a world of adults going around
> pulling each other's hair and scratching each other's faces." Whenever I see a
> child or children I always like to imagine their behavior in an adult.
>   Which made me think that it might be interesting to construct a fictional
> story about a group of infants and toddlers who grew up on their own, say, on
> an island, and what sort of society they might develop. Lord of the Flies
> attempted something similar, but with people who had already been raised
> several years within the heart of Empire, and so already had emergent imperial
> selves, thusly it is no wonder that they created barbaric imperial states.
> (And how I remember in high school this book being used as "proof" that people
> need government, need parental molding to keep from becoming monsters! Ha!
> Monsters perhaps, but there may be nonimperial monsters that are possible to
> spawn ...) It seems more interesting to take people whose seedlings of
> subjectification are still multiple and not totalized into an imperial
> formation ... This of course brings in the whole feral children controversy.
> Was the Wild Boy of Aveyron just an autistic child who got thrown into the
> woods because his parents couldn't handle him, or was he really a wolf child
> who became autistic because of lack of language? The feral children argument
> is always used, in paean after paean (and how paeanful these are!), to
> demonstrate that, yes, without language, without social subjectification, we
> would be totally nonhuman. Yah, ok, so what? Are these children examples of
> the highest power or the lowest power of that nonhumanness? Has anyone yet
> attempted an appreciative phenomenology of the consciousness of these feral
> children, tried to appreciate what their mindstate might have been like, what
> connections it might have made? Or have we assumed it remained on an "animal"
> level -- whatever that means, as if "animality" were a monolithic stupidity
> and not a cognitive / visceral / intensive multiplicity ... OUR stupidity
> regarding animals and their experience has been so rampant and is just now in
> the seedling stages of being overcome it is no wonder that when comparisons
> are made to animals, these children come out as stupid brutes. But has anyone
> ever done a deleuzian take on the feral children problem? Is autism the only
> possibility outside of signification and subjectification? If as Stern points
> out there are emergent selvings from the intensive ambience of the milieu,
> then couldn't we imagine entirely foreign types of selves emerging from a
> forest experience? Deleuze in The Logic of Sense discusses how a consciousness
> without the construct of the Other might be.
>   But in our example, we have a number of different toddlers and infants
> together who can co-socialize each other. Let's say we're on an island with no
> rampant predators and plenty of roots and berries that these children can
> sniff out and feed themselves with. Let's throw in some toddlers with
> babbling, prelinguistic, almost on the threshold of linguistic, states, so
> there's some possible direction but without shaping it can go in myriad ways.
> These toddlers can become the organizers for the social field. If we come back
> in twenty years, what might we see?
>   Or, if we see this as unlikely due to infant dependence (again, the
> discourse about feral children should be entirely reexamined), then perhaps
> let us imagine an island of infants raised entirely by autistic, retarded
> adults, or by schizophrenics. What will we see upon returning?
>   It would be nice to see a historical or (pre)historical perspective on
> developmental practices and resulting consciousnesses. Regardless of how
> accurate you think it is, I think Julian Jaynes provides some interesting
> imaginative breaks in the history of consciousness with his Breakdown of the
> Bicameral Mind and the notion that up until past Homer, humanity was not
> "conscious" but almost in a sense schizophrenic -- hearing voices and so on.
> If we look at paleoanthropology, we have to assume that between the ancestors
> of chimps and humans, and the emergence of what we would call "fully human" (
> o god what ideology hides herein), there had to be multiple stages and lines
> of development within the hominid, "proto-human"(although this term is
> assumptive and perhaps arrogant) phenomenology. If we posit a hominid stage of
> development without speech, are we talking autistic adults raising children?
> How about children raised in monasteries with vows of silence? Does their
> subjectivity center around bells and the sounds of voices resounding in the
> cathedrals? Both individual- and species- infancy (babies and hominids) seems
> to hold many potential lines of flight which could be explored...
> 
> (un)leash
> 


   

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