Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Refiguring childhood: Hannah Arendt, natality, and Title prefigurative biopolitics Author(s) Ryan, Kevin Publication 2018-05-18 Date Ryan, K. (2018). Refiguring childhood: Hannah Arendt, Publication natality and prefigurative biopolitics. Childhood, doi: Information 10.1177/0907568218777302 Publisher SAGE Publications Link to publisher's http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0907568218777302 version Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/7370 DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0907568218777302 Downloaded 2023-01-26T00:48:53Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. The version of record of this article is published in Childhood (published online 18th May 2018: http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/chda/0/0 ). DOI: 10.1177/0907568218777302. Refiguring childhood: Hannah Arendt, natality, and prefigurative biopolitics Kevin Ryan School of Political Science & Sociology, NUI Galway Email: [email protected] Abstract Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality spans birth and action, which combine to inaugurate the new. Natality is used here to examine childhood as a prefigurative form of biopolitics. This concerns practices that seek to actualise envisioned futures by conditioning and constraining natality, thereby shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. The article concludes by reflecting on whether this corralling of natality might be subverted with a view to refiguring childhood. Keywords Arendt, biopolitics, childhood, natality, prefiguration Introduction Action…corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world…if we had a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a “who” as though it were a “what” – Hannah Arendt (1998/1958: 9-11): At one time or another – whether in philosophical, scientific, or policy discourse – what Hannah Arendt has to say about the abstract figure of Man applies also to childhood. Although this has recently begun to collapse under the weight of its own universalising pretentions, the concept of childhood still exhibits a tendency to transform a who into a what. From roughly the mid-eighteenth century onwards, mass societies in the global North – and this is the context under investigation here – have spawned a constellation of biopolitical techniques and technologies that seek to take hold of life in the form of childhood with the aim of prefiguring human futures. To mention but one example as a way of approaching my argument: by carving that portion of human life known as childhood into developmental milestones and stages, a fictional ‘normal’ child was fashioned through a process of measurement, comparison, and aggregation (Rose, 1990: 131-43). This is one of the ways that childhood has come to answer to a benignly descriptive assertion which, in everyday practical terms, is merely a matter of applying the appropriate category. Posed from the perspective of an authoritative gaze that assumes the stance of objectivity, the assertion assigns positions within the social order while also enacting an injunction to know one’s place, and in this way it anticipates – indeed insists upon – a response from the subject that affirms the judgement concealed within the assertion itself, and it goes as follows: this is a child; you are a child; I am a child. This is the ontological touchstone that has long grounded a constellation of prefigurative practices aimed at governing the future by managing the biosocial process known as child development. The old monological discourses of childhood have of course now been deconstructed and challenged by a ‘new paradigm’ which is attentive to the agency of children. In their influential Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, Alan Prout and Allison James re- presented children as ‘active social beings’ (1997: 25), while Nick Lee has since taken this a step further. Whereas in the past, he writes, ‘there were two types of humans, the new paradigm sees only one – the human being who is a social agent’ (2001: 47). While it may once have seemed obvious, or at least unproblematic, to distinguish adult ‘human beings’ from child ‘human becomings’ (Qvortrup, 1994), in the age of labour flexibility, life-long learning and what I will later present as neo-liberal enterprise culture, adults and children apparently co-habit a situation described by Lee as ‘becoming without end’ (2001: 85). While agreeing with Lee’s focus on context, as well as his fluid rendering of the being/becoming duality, there is more that needs to be excavated from the conceptual weave that threads the being/becoming relation through the adult/child relation. Nested within it is another axis around which the question of childhood pivots, and this concerns the distinction noted above: between the what and the who in question. Moreover, this too has a crucial bearing on how childhood has been – and still is – used to prefigure the future. In other words, childhood persists as a declarative category articulated in situations where authority is at stake, where compliance is expected, and when vulnerability or ‘risk’ is invoked, so that the obviousness of being able to say: s/he is a child is accompanied by the conventional mode of address: you are a child, and thus the expected response is always- already assumed: yes, I am a child. However, there are exceptions – situations where the mode of address framed by the whatness of childhood is displaced by an insistence on a who, and I present one such case below. For now, to anticipate the discussion that follows, I wish to propose a scenario where an open question displaces the self-assuredness of assertion; a question that is not pre-loaded with the category of ‘child’, thereby traversing the being/becoming relation while also troubling the child/adult distinction. The question then is not ‘what are you?’ but rather ‘who are you?’ This question is derived from Arendt’s concept of natality, which affords a way of engaging critically with the whatness of childhood. My objective is not to attempt to dispense with the category of childhood, which would be nonsensical, but rather to trouble the ways in which childhood is used to stage prefigurative forms of biopolitics. As a mode of power that seeks to bring envisioned futures into the present, prefiguration bridges being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. This article also responds to a recent editorial for Childhood by Spyros Spyrou, calling for the decentring of childhood and proposing relationality as a way of moving the field in new directions. Natality is one such relational approach that can be used to think childhood beyond children. Between birth and action: natality and the new In her introduction to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1998: xvii), Margaret Canovan remarks that the book’s ‘most heartening message is its reminder of natality and the miracle of beginning’. In contrast to Arendt’s former teacher Martin Heidegger, for whom authentic being-in-the-world requires facing into our inescapable mortality – our being-towards-death – Arendt’s political theory is anchored in natality as the affirmation of life. Before examining the somewhat elusive concept of natality itself (as many Arendtian scholars have pointed out, Arendt never examined her own use of this concept in depth or detail), it is important to clarify what Arendt means by ‘the human condition’, which brings me back to her use of the words ‘nature’ and ‘essence’ in the epigraph above. Arendt is emphatic on this point: ‘the human condition is not the same as human nature’ (1998: 9-10). What she means is that there is no essence that would allow us to flatten human plurality into a singularity that answers to the whatness of ‘Man’1. Instead we need to understand how we are conditioned by a world of our own making, or to rephrase that: history lives in how we think, speak, and act. Moreover, although we are ‘conditioned beings’ in that the ideas, things, practices and relations that have become conditions of our individual and collective existence have a history, it remains the case that ‘the conditions of human existence…can never “explain” what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely’ (1998: 11). Though life and death, natality and mortality, amount to ‘the most general condition of human existence’ (1998: 8), what matters for Arendt is active life, or action-as-beginning, and it is this that forges the connection between natality and politics. Natality is actualised in spaces where actors appear before each other through words and deeds, or what Arendt calls ‘the space of appearances’. This is her way of saying that politics is staged in spaces of mutual exposition where it is possible to begin something, to set something new and unpredictable in motion, though once this process begins it is no longer a matter of individual will or intention. To take the initiative is to put natality into play, but whatever emerges from such initiative arises between people who co-exist in a conditioned/conditioning web of relationships. ‘Wherever people come together’ says Arendt, they generate a space ‘that simultaneously gathers them into it and separates them from one another’ (2005: 106). It is this space of the in-between – a relational space – that provides the setting or scene for natality. Natality is thus generated between people acting within a context that places the standing conditions in question, such that it becomes necessary or at least possible to think differently, to act otherwise – to respond to the situation, thereby setting something new in motion. A crucially important feature of natality – evident in the word itself – is that it traces the source of political action to birth, such that ‘the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting’ (1998: 9). In every such case, the appearance of a new- born child precipitates the question: who are you? (1998: 178-9). Arendt is here emphasising plurality – that each person is unique and also uniquely capable of acting in a way which, as noted above, exceeds her conditioning. Spanning birth and action, natality encapsulates the adult/child relation, yet there is a curious lacuna in how Arendt presents this in The Human Condition. If we track natality to the ‘scene of birth’ (see Cavarero, 2014) and consider the question which – for Arendt – is precipitated by the appearance of the new-born child (Who are you?), then what should we make of her suggestion that this question is answered through what one does and what one says in the presence of others? As Arendt puts it, ‘the disclosure of “who” in contradistinction to “what” somebody is – her qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which she may display or hide – is implicit in everything somebody says and does’ (1998: 179). Although ‘action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth’ (1998: 178), it is the ‘second birth’ of action that is Arendt’s primary concern, such that the figure of the new-born child appears only to vanish almost immediately, replaced by an expressive who endowed suddenly with the attributes of adult life (1998: 176-7). Otherwise put, it is as though the scene of birth merely serves to prefigure the political realm of action. So what exactly happens between birth and action? Arendt addresses this question in an essay on ‘The crisis in education’, published the same year as The Human Condition. ‘What concerns us all’ she explains, ‘is the relation between grown-ups and children in general or, putting it in even more general and exact terms, our attitude toward the fact of natality’ (2006: 193). Natality is a delicate balancing act, because on the one hand ‘the child requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to her from the world’, while on the other hand the world ‘needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation’ (2006: 182). It is here that Arendt fills out the lacuna mentioned above. Children ‘are not finished but in a state of becoming’ she says, and it is the responsibility of those with (temporary) authority over children to ensure that education is orientated to ‘the task of renewing a common world’ which is home to adults and children alike, though this must be done ‘without striking from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us’ (2006: 174, 182-3, 193). To follow the thread of these remarks by Arendt is to connect natality to the question of ‘becoming’ which, as noted in the introduction above, traverses not only the relation between adult ‘human beings’ and child ‘human becomings’ (Qvortrup), but also a more fugitive ‘becoming without end’ (Lee). On one side is a mode of becoming that perceives children as incomplete adults, while on the other side is something very different, and Arendt gestures towards both. Walter Omar Kohan examines what I have just referred to as fugitive becoming under the heading of ‘alternative concepts of childhood’ (2011: 341- 44). One such alternative is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ‘becoming-child’ (1987: 272- 91), which has nothing to do with a stage in the life-cycle and nor is it measurable in chronological time. Instead, in Kohan’s words, becoming-child is a ‘space of transformation’ marked by flux, intensity, affects and experiences that cannot be anticipated or planned. Becoming-child exceeds the conditioning of historical time while also taking flight from social conditioning, which might be seen to radicalise the concept of natality. However it must be noted that this is neither a prescriptive formula nor a tried and tested practice. Instead becoming-child operates at the threshold of imaginary projection and critical intervention. That there is even a perceived need to invoke or summon this fugitive/radical mode of becoming says something important about natality in the context of mass society, which Arendt depicts as ‘the rise of the social’ and ‘the loss of human experience’ (1998: 321). Mass society is a society of labourers, and to labour, as opposed to experiencing the freedom to act – noting that to act is to participate in ‘renewing the common world’ (and by ‘common’ Arendt means the shared public world that arises between people acting in concert) – is, as Arendt sees it, merely ‘to fulfil a necessary function in the life process of society’ (2006: 38-49, 184). Without suggesting an exact homology, there is a striking similarity between Arendt’s analysis of mass society, whereby the bureaucratic administration of the life process of society becomes ‘rule by Nobody’ (1970: 38), and what Michel Foucault examined through the lens of biopolitics/biopower – supervising and administering life with a view to optimising, augmenting, and regulating life processes and populations2 (Foucault, 1998: 139-41). In Foucault’s work, modern mass society marks the entry of biological life into the political arena, such that political strategies would henceforth be staged on the terrain of life itself. What I am suggesting is that childhood has become a type of targeted zone within the larger biopolitical arena, a zone characterised by attempts to act upon life in its ‘unfinished’ form (childhood), thereby transforming what is into what ought to be (see Kohan 2011: 340). Moreover, this is also a means of prefiguring the future by constituting the subject who is to inhabit the future envisioned by its architects and technicians. In drawing Arendt and Foucault together in this way, I am not suggesting some type of seamless theoretical synthesis. Instead, I want to avail of the productive tension between natality and biopolitics. I will return to the question of becoming-child/acting otherwise later by drawing on the idea of an ‘affirmative biopolitics’. First however I want to examine how natality, which could be described as life exceeding its social conditioning, is instrumental in constituting the whatness of childhood. Disciplining natality: protecting the vulnerable child In the introduction I hinted at a speech situation whereby a child refuses to answer to the whatness of childhood, insisting instead on being addressed as a who. The child in question is not a hypothetical example but a boy who appeared before a judge in France in 1840. Originally reported in the Gazette des Tribunaux, Michel Foucault examined the case in his Discipline and Punish (1977: 290-291), where he introduces the boy as ‘a child of thirteen, without home or family, charged with vagabondage’. I am going to reproduce the exchange between the boy (referred to in the Gazette only as Béasse, presumably his surname) and the judge in full, noting that Foucault interprets the boy’s ‘insolence’ – meaning the way he reformulates the offences he stands accused of – as ‘the affirmation of a living force’. In the context of this episode, ‘natality’ could well stand in for Foucault’s turn of phrase: Judge: One must sleep at home. Béasse: have I got a home? Judge: You live in perpetual vagabondage. Béasse: I work to earn my living. Judge: What is your station in life? Béasse: My station, to begin with, I’m thirty-six at least; I don’t work for anybody. I’ve worked for myself for a long time now. I have my day station and my night station. In the day, for instance, I hand out leaflets free of charge to all the passers-by; I run after the stage-coaches when they arrive and carry luggage for the passengers; I turn cartwheels on the avenue at Neuilly; at night there are the shows; I open coach doors, I sell pass-out tickets; I’ve plenty to do. Judge: It would be better for you to be put in a good house as an apprentice and learn a trade. Béasse: Oh, a good house, an apprenticeship, it’s too much trouble. And anyway, the bourgeois…always grumbling, no freedom. Judge: Does not your father wish to reclaim you? Béasse: Haven’t got no father. Judge: And your mother? Béasse: No mother neither, no parents, no friends, free and independent. Gazette des tribunaux: Hearing his sentence of two years in a reformatory, Béasse pulled an ugly face, then, recovering his good humour, remarked: ‘Two years, that’s never more that twenty-four months. Let’s be off, then’. What should we make of Béasse’s claim that he is ‘thirty-six at least’? Foucault doesn’t help us here, but surely this is at odds with his description of the boy. Perhaps this a boy who refuses to be infantilised, who insists on a maturity and liberty he claims for himself through his experience of life; or to draw from Kohan once more, perhaps Béasse is becoming-child by exceeding the bounds of childhood? In any case, the exchange is framed by a deeply unequal power relationship between a judge who represents the coercive power of the law, and a boy without property or station, yet who exhibits the courage to address the law not as a what (a vagrant) but as a who, narrating the truth of his life as he sees it, and performing this truth before a public assembled in the court. This episode sets the scene for the emergence of interventions into the space of the family in order to ‘rescue’ children from ‘neglect’. Children such as young Béasse were perceived to be on route to a life of crime and/or dependency on public assistance, and thus destined either way to become a burden on society. Parental neglect was foremost among the alleged causes of such ‘delinquency’, and thus the demoralising influence of the home and the street were to be counteracted by rescuing children and placing them in enclosed institutions such as the Mettray penal colony in France – a reformatory institution for male delinquents opened the same year as Béasse was sentenced, and as Foucault describes it, a curious blend of regiment, hospital, workshop, school, and prison; a synthesis of inspection, training and punishment overseen by ‘technicians of behaviour, engineers of conduct’ (1977: 293). In the decades following Béasse’s appearance in court, reformatory education would gradually be supplemented by other experiments such as societies for infant life protection and the prevention of cruelty to children, school medical inspections, and juvenile courts. Taken together, these initiatives converged as a child-centric conception of vulnerability that constrained the agency of children while also defining the whatness of childhood. The series of infant life protection Acts in Britain for example, which paved the way for the Children’s Act of 1908 (or Children’s Charter as it was widely known), afford a concrete example of how the strategy of child-saving culminated in a discourse of ‘protection’ that muted the voice of the child within the emergent field of juvenile justice. Among the features of the juvenile courts as they came into existence in France, Britain and many American cities – more or less concurrently – was the absence of the public who provided Béasse with his audience. Henri Rollet, France’s first juvenile judge made this precise point in 1922 when he wrote that the removal of the public ‘has excellent results, for the child tends to glory in the interest he arouses and takes pride in seeing his name in the newspapers’ (quoted in Donzelot, 1979: 100-101). What better example of this biopolitical imaginary than a paper read by one S. Shannon Millin before the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland in 1917. Describing the Children’s Act of 1908 as ‘the great charter of the helpless’, Millin invoked the ‘rights of children’, arguing that children must be protected not only from the ‘sordid greed’ of predatory employers but also from the neglect of ‘idle, vicious and drunken parents, who utilise their children as wage-earning instruments’ (1917: 304-311). But why should children be rescued from these conditions? Millen’s answer to this question is instructive: vulnerable children must be protected because they are an ‘asset’ which is otherwise denied to the nation. The title of Millin’s paper makes the point succinctly: ‘Child Life as a National Asset’, and he was by no means alone in this strategic framing of child life. The proliferation of means to monitor and manage ‘the numbers of our children, their physical fitness, and their mental development’ (Crichton, 1925: 302-5) massively augmented the biopolitical vision that spawned the penal reformatory school. Deeply rooted in the theme of child-protection, the twentieth century generated an encompassing apparatus of biopower that aimed to minimise ‘the manufacture of criminals and paupers’ while maximising the numbers equipped to serve the nation into the future (Millin, 1917: 316). I end this brief historical survey by returning to Béasse in 1840, and to Foucault’s assessment of his sassy performance as the ‘affirmation of a living force’. Staged before a public audience, Béasse acted in the Arendtian sense by transforming the court – albeit momentarily – into a space where he appeared before others not merely as a unique who, but also as the embodiment of a life lived as endless beginning. Béasse exceeds what he is permitted to be in the eyes of the law, or at least its representative – the judge who makes a ruling intended to bring the chaos of beginnings to a halt by transforming the who into a what: an apprentice with a trade, a station, a home, a fixed place in the order of things. This is what is at stake in the framing of childhood as a national asset, because such an obscenely instrumentalising (yet also mundanely practical) idea presupposes that the unpredictable and generative quality of natality can and ought to be disciplined, such that the whatness of childhood becomes organic material to be shaped and formed by the technicians and architects of the future. What is imagined is a future that has tamed natality by fashioning