From: Unleesh-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 02:47:22 EDT
Subject: deleuzian lord of the flies


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