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THE CHILD AND POSTMODERN SUBJECTMTY David Kennedy Department of Educational Foundations Montclair State Univer ity

In between the view that children are what adults are, know what adults know, and deserve exactly what adults deserve and the view that children are the negation or opposite of adults in being, knowledge, and desert, is an a yet unfathomable range of po ibilities that merits exploration and mapping.'

The epigraph, taken from the introduction to a recently published volume of essays on the views on childhood of eleven Western philosophers, combines metaphors with a gentIe but unsettling sense of disjunction. 2 The first sits squarely on the Aristotelian logical foundation of identity and negation. Adults are adults and children are not-adults, or vice versa. The econd evokes the exploration of uncharted waters. Where, between the immutable logical markers of the law of contradiction, does the diver slip in to the problem? If she enters with ethics, philosophy of rights, property and law, she soon hits the hard and shallow bottom of centuries of accretion of the Western tradition - a subsurface long etched and striated with familiar distinctions, contradictions, dilemmas, and aporias - and finds herself wading. For this discourse, "child" might as well be marker for any subspecies real or inlagined by the white male We tern academic philosopher - woman, primitive, insane, slave, poor, aninlal: the Other held at arm's length. But what if the contradictions so adamantly upheld and institutionalized in Western binary consciousness enter into dialectical relation? What if we recognize them as poles of a whole system of relations, and so liable to all the transformations, deformations, reversals, and tensions of the process of dialectic? Here we slip off the ledge. Can the word" child" be spoken without speaking the word"adult," and vice ver a? Is childhood, like adulthood, a form of knowledge, and therefore available either to both children and adults? Is adult "reason" which children, all of these philosophers say,lack - is this Reason imaginable apart from an irrational that gives it its shape? How are children like adults? How are adults like children? Can adulthood and childhood be known apart from their relation? If these questions push us toward the psychological, so be it. Psychology is a form of the philosophy of subjectivity anyway, and philosophy is capable of more than one form of logic. THE CHILD AS "VALUABLE STRANCER" AND REASO

's IRRAT10NAL CORE

What is peculiar and compelling about these questions is that they probe the boundaries of two epochal problems of Western self-interpretation. At least since 1. Gareth Matthews, The Philo ophel's Child (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19991, 6.

2. Socrates, Ari totle, the Stoics, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Wittgenstein, Rawls, and Shulamith FirestOne. 3. Plato, The Republic, nan . and ed. P.M. Comford (London: Oxford University Press), 140. EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Spring 2002/ Volume 52 / Number 2 © 2002 Board of Trustees / University of I1linoi

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Friedrich Nietzsche, and probably since Ernst Hegel and the Romantics, the question of the status of reason in the economy of subjectivity has preoccupied some artists, some psychologists, some philosophers} and many of those who presume to consider themselves artists of their own live . Related to thi question, and rendered insistent by centuries of radical individualism, is the question of the historical character of subjectivity} and the po sibilities - if there be possibilities at all - of both its development and its evolution. The Western subject defines itself according to the relations between rea on and d sir . Plato's tripartite soul is the first statement that has come down to us of this relation, although his formula i a reproduction of Indo-European ocial, economic, and political structure, which was in place centuries if not a millennium before his Republic. Rea on, the smallest of the three parts} must rule emotion and appetite. Although the images Plato uses to invoke thi tripartite relation include mu ical harmony and the proper tension of a drawn bow, the final images are of domination and control. Reason and its"subordinate and ally" the "spirited element, /I hays, "must be set in command over the appetite, which form the greater part of each man's soul and are by nature insatiably covetous. /13 This right relation b tw en the three parts of the soul is impossible for children, who are, along with women, laves, and the "inferior multitude," be et by "th great rna of multifariou appetite and pleasures and pains,"4 for being an adult require an internal a well a an external submission to a separated part of one' ubjective tructure. It is th part that Ari totle call the" executive."s It requires, not so much a process or a movement a a terminal reorganization according to hierarchical internal power rela tion . It i the founding metapsychological condition for Descartes's res cogitan ,th 1£ upended above itself, which finds the res extensa alien, a flesWy mechani m. Thi form of subjectivity comes to the boundary between childhood and adulthood a to a great divide - for which adulthood, as Gareth Mathews says, is a state which i accomplished absolutely and once and for all when childhood, it contrary, is transcended. Childhood is merely the preparation for that which definitively leave it behind."6 /I

This normative self-structure dominates the Western patriarchal tradition, and it must exclude the Other in the form of child, woman, "native," and" lave" - any form of subjectivity in which body and feeling, in other word , /I de ire," In terplay in a different relation with reason. This structure begin to unravel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with the understanding of reason that holds it in

4. Ibid., 125. 5. Aristotle, Physics, uan . W. Charlton, in A New Aristotle Reader, ed. Princeton Univer ity Pre 51, .l 04.

J.L.

AckrilllPrinccton

.J.:

6. Matthew, The Philo opher's Child,96. DAVID KENNEDY i A ociate Profe or in the Department of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NT 07043. His primary area of scholarship arc philosophy of childhood and community of inquiry studies.

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place. Something begin to emerge - a tentative subjectivity as yet in doubt but still emerging, influenced by and in turn influencing the accelerating transformations of modernism: evolutionary theory, physics and cosmology, depth psychology, technological explosion, ideological struggle in the realms of politics and economics, postcolonialism, and perhap most important, the ever-increasing intervisibility of cultures on a planetary scale. One of the prophets of this long transitional moment (along with women, people of color, the artist, the mad, and the aboriginal) is the child. Launched by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's brilliant and contradictory formulation of Emile, childhood as a psychological condition and a form of knowledge assumes iconic significance among the Romantics, those first modem ecular rebels against Reason. In their search for the "foreign/, the exotic - other cultures, other times, other forms of life - they find the most exemplary specimen of difference within their midst. The child, and especially the young child, that "best philo opher/J7 begins to stand in} with the artist, as prophet of a new subjective economy, an economy in which Plato's three dimensions enter a crisis of interpretation. Aufklarung has already shown its dark underside in the excesses of the French Revolution, and the ri e of hyper-rationalized state bureaucracies which follows reinforces the sense, growing throughout the nineteenth century, that it hides an irrational core - a sinister reversal. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoievsky, and Sigmund Freud begin charting dimensions of the p yche that progressively confound Plato's nested linear hierarchy, and hint at other psycho-logics - Freud's logic of dreams, for example - thatare deconstructive of the law of contradiction which dominates common sense notions. In this shifting moment, the condition of childhood come gradually to be seen, no longer as an unformed adult subjectivity, but as a form of subjectivity in itself. Relative to the dominant norms of adult subjectivity, the child become what the feminist philosopher Sandra Harding characterizes as a "valuable stranger" among the cultural "natives," an "outsider within," with an "epistemic privilege." The child represents no longer an incomplete but an altemative epistemology. Ontogenetically, the child is a subjective tructure characterized by transformation - a paradigm for what Julia Kristeva, in describing the emergent postmodern elf, called the "subject.in-process/' or self as a pluralism of relationships rather than an "organization constituted by exclusions and hierarchies."9 Childhood stands for "jouissance," the experience of pre-Oedipal "forgotten time," ecstatic moments in which the socially constructed form of the boundary line between self and external world is deconstructed in the interests of ongoing elf·reconstruction. 10 The child is 7, William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimation of Immortality from Recollection of Early Childhood," in Poems, ed. H.T. HalllNew York: Scott Foresman, 19241, 195.

8. Sandra Harclin& Whose Science! Whose Knowledge! Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 124, 131,307. 9. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 135 and Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Ab;ection INew York: Columbia University Press, 1987),65.

10. Catherine Marchak, "The loY of Transgression: Bataille and Kristeva," in Philosophy Today 34, no. 4 IWinter 19901: 354-63.

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an experimental being, in rapid and continual reorganization; a being in which the elements of self are in dialogue, both internally and with the external world. Slowly, with the growth of developmental psychology throughout the twentieth century, the adult comes to see herself, hke the child, as an unfinished being as well. An unfinished being is one in which the relations among the various dimensions of the self are not fixed, but in dialogue for the purpo es of ongoing reorganization. In this interpretation, the goal of self-development has not been abandoned so much as infinitely deferred. The fixed goal of the Platonic subject is reflectiv of a static metaphysics - a dualism in which a transcendent model is offered a an end tate of development. The subject-in-process is oriented toward what Dewey called "growth," for the purpo e of growth, becau e intrinsic to growth it elf are all the values which justify it, The organismic theory of the early twentieth century, emergent from evolutionary biology, identifies - at least on on dirnen ion - its developmental dynamics: the progressive integration of functions in a imultaneou movement toward centralization, hierarchization, and individual articulation. Among the "lower" animal, this process is relatively fixed, and arranged predictably acro s the life cycle. The bles ing and the curse of human i the element of ind t rminacy that renders a closed sy tern an open one. In this regard, human a y tern phenomena are somewhere between the mollusk and the weather. THE

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It was the Romantics who discovered "child" a an alternative subjectivity and prophet of unfinished being. In fact they were recapitulating a perennial count r Wisdom tradition, present at least since the Tao Te Ching, which compare the one in harmony with the Tao to a newborn child, I I and inscribed in Judeo-Chri tian elfunderstanding in the Jesus-sayings on "little children. "12 Suffering a th y wer with the dramatic failure of Enlightenment Reason in the bloodbaths of the French Revolution, they were in a sense beginning again. Holderin invokes the "Edenic elfunity of childhood" as an adult developmental ideal, of which the child i prophetic precursor. 13 Samuel Coleridge searches for a form of education - or Bildung - that would" carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. "14 Thi unity, which for the Platonic subject implies the eradication of childhood, i for the Romantics it recovery. The promi e i a new kind of ociallife, ba ed on th adult's reappropriation of the child's form of life on a "higher" level- a world characterized by, as Reinhard Kuhn put it, "the transparence of its inhabitant and ub equent perfection of their interrelationship. This ideal harmony would make pos ible the 11. Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mjtchelll ew York: Harper and Row, 19881, 55. 12, For a urvey of this tradition, see David Kennedy, "Child and Fool in the Western Wi dom Tradition,"

Thinking 11, no. I: 11-21 and "The Hermeneutics of Childhood," Philosophy Today36, no.

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pring 1992):

44-58.

13, Quoted in M.H. Abrams, Natul'al Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: onon, 1971),239. 14. Quoted in Judith Plotz, "The PerperuaJMessiah: Romanticism, Childhood, and the Paradoxes of Human Development," in Regula ted Children/Liberated Children, ed. Barbara Finkelstein INew York: Psychohistory Pres, 1977),81.

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abolition of the rules of civilization and would result in a humanity without aesthetic and sociallaws./I 's This is the vision of a counter-modem, post-adult utopia, in which the distinction between public and private self is abolished; we "live and feel in the present," a "unitary, undivided existence." The polariti s that make for the "dividedness, alienation, and inner deadness of modernity" - between spirit and matter, mind and nature, desire and necessity - are overcome. The high Romantic mediation between thought and feeling takes the child and the artist as its exemplary symbols. for Nietzsche, "child" is the final "metamorphosis" (after camel and lion) of the" pirit of man."16 The Romantics were looking for a way out of the closed system of subjectivity that Plato's tripartite elf repre ents, but could only pre ent the new ubject as a prophetic, utopian figure - or, like that other Romantic figure, the dark, alienated adult of Compte de Lautreamont, Marquis DeSade, or Do toiev ky, an anti-hero. But Romanticism breaks into real time in the closet lor repressed) Romantic Freud, who finds the very continuity between child and adult, and its fatal disconnect in the vicissitudes of development, which Coleridge invoked. As Ashi Nandy has said of him, Freud demonstrated that Childhood and adulthood [are] not twO fixed phase of the human life-cycJe(where the latter Iha I to inescapably upplant the fonnerl. but a continuum which, while diachronica!l ylaid out on the plane of life hj tory, [i I alway synchronically pre ent in each per onality.I'

Thus Freud breaks the contradiction "adult/child" and puts the two forms of knowledge and being in dialectical relation. In 0 doing, he prepare the way for that revision of subjectivity as "in process" which the Romantics had been struggling to locate among the ruins of Enlightenment. He deals the first definitive blow to Plato's closed, hierarchical ystem. Carl Jung then tak it a step further. Freud moves subjectivity from a closed toward an open system using more or less the arne element a Plato lId, Ego, and uperego); but what moves the system toward openness is that these very elements are split, doubled, put in mutual reflection, and complicated by being both inside and outside the individual subject - that is, in the other a well a the elf. Through po iting what is called "introjection" and "projection, terms that express the operations of this intersubjective field, psychoanalytic theory extends the subjective into the intersubjectiveandmake of elfandotherone ystemwith hiftingboundarie .1 To deconstruct the classical model further, Ego, one representative of Plato's reason, has its dark irrational shadow and mirror in the Superego, another representative. The /I

15. Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature (Hanover .H.: New England Uruversity Press, 1982),229. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus SpakeZarathusLra, in The Portable Nietzscbe, trans. Walter Kau&nan (New York: Viking Press, 19541, 137. 17. A his

andy, "Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood," in Traditions.

Tyrlllll1y, and Utopia (Delhi: Oxford Uruver ity Pres, 19871,71.

18. Introjection and projection, nrst postulated by Freud, are developed in British object relations theory. Por a summary of the main theori t , see David E. Scharff, Refjnding the Object and Reclaiming the Self (Northvale N.J.: Jason Aronson, 19921, chap 3.

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latter takes the elements of reason and suffuses them with emotionally charged voices and feeling. Nor does ld accept it ub ervience to Ego, knowing that the latter is simply the ambiguous, shifting outer zone where it meets the world. Id mocks the law of contradiction, and insists on a deeper, more conflicted, more dialectically charged self-narrative, expressed through dream and intuition in the logic of art, premonition, and famasyplay. Id i not only Plato's appetite, but appetite interfused with the highest and deepest spiritual impul es. Becau e of the e contradictions, Ego, in it presumption to rule, finds itself continually undermined by reversals and misunderstandings, and bypassed, doubled, split, and mirrored by introjection and projection. Tung draws the dialectical and developmental implication of Freud's deconstruction of the Platonic hierarchy. In th cour e of the life cycle there come a moment, which he identifies with mid-life, when the Ego [or reason) is, a he puts it, "dethroned. JlI9 Its executive function is demoted to that of broker, negotiatOr, communicator, and - if the transition i successful- master of dialogue. Freud did not quite recognize this decentering of the Ego, except as a structural guarantee of human neurosis. His ambivalence is coded in his famou statement, "Where ld wa Ego shall be, "20 which neglects to add thatldis Ego's ground, and so Ego hall be there - in relative psychic health anyway - only to the extent to which it allow Id to inform its deepest aspirations and even affects. Tung took Freud's structural analy is, placed it within the whole life cycle, and set it in dialectical motion. This ignals the shift from a totalistic to a pluralistic subjective economy, which ha become the hallmark of the postmodem. Henceforth, the internal polity of the self ha become democratized. The I is forced to recognize the other within, and to accept that other a itself. The implications for recognition and acceptance of the other Out ide one elf follow, and are developed in an emergent theory of dialogue, inaugurated b Martin Buber in the early twentieth centuryY It is of no little significance - and e pecially to educational theory - that Freud's inquiry was focused on childhood. To look into childhood is to gaze into the fundamental themes of the dialogical self. In Freud's infant the original b dy- elf i in fact the ld, and furthermore, Id in an aduali tic relation with the external word I am what I behold. Superego has not yet emerged, and only the prestructure of Ego are present in the form of, for lack of a better term, Kant's categorie of under tanding. The infant body is a kind of mystical body, or at least appears that way to the (after Freud' organized adult body, in which the polymorphous plea ure cenrer ha receded to the genitals with their insistent tension ,and the Superego erected a a hadowa watcher - over the Ego and it truggle for balance. Perhaps .0. Brown, the quintessential post-Romantic, is exaggerating when he says, "Our indestructible

19. CG. lung, Tbe Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2d ed. trans. R.F.C. HulllPrinceton: Bollingen, 19691. 20. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the ld, ed. James Strachey, trans. loan Riviere (1924; reprint, New York: W.W. Nonon, 1990),24. 21. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribners, 1970).

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unconscious desire for a return to childhood, our deep childhood-fixation, is a desire for a return to the pleasure-principle, for a recovery of the body from which culture alienates us, and for play instead of work."zz At any rate, Freud's infant subjectivity is a first, prophetic statement of the possibilities for unification - both internally and with the external world - which, given a nonlinear under tanding of the lifecycle, i always with the adult as both an indistinct memory of a whole other form of lived experience, and an indistinct pre-apprehension of an analogous future form. Freud's infant is in fact a "scientific" inscription of the Divine Child, which Jung identified as among hi archetypes of the unconscious, and characterized as representing a "paradoxical union between the lowest and the highest, and both an original and a terminal unity of conscious and unconscious - the beginning and the end. 23 If

Later, the child of three to six (more or less) undergoes yet another form of lived experience. She becomes what Elizabeth Jones has called a "master player"24-a bricolateur of the psychological, discursive, and performative space that adults associate with art, spirituality, exuality, and deep feeling and thinking - which D.W. Winnicott called "transitional."25 Tran itional pace de cribes the experience of playing with, in the interests of overcoming, the hifting boundary between in ide and outside which adults more often than not repres in the interests of a necessary practicality. In the young child it is most clearly expressed in solitary fantasy play, where the player her elf decides what is possible and what is not. In transitional space, the world ac ts in the form of my projection, which is also an introjection from the world - projection and introjection unite. It is the way the world would act when it act the way I would have it act, and welcomes the way I act. It is childhood's final bid for the realization of "our indestructible unconscious desire" - self-world unity. Then, in the young child's play with an other, transitional play enters the realm of dialogue and neg tiation - and here relation becomes a theater of possibility. Perhaps the closest adults come to this form of mutual transitionality is in erotic play, in which giving and receiving pleasure, informed by fanta y, i experienced by the whole body, thus invoking the originary infant polymorphicity. But it can also be present in philosophical dialogue, in musical play with others, in revel, and in ritual in all its po sible forms - including, for example, the lived experience of sport. In all these cases, we can experience a form of intersubjectivity which decon tructs the strict boundary between elf and other, and elf and world, and allow for the creative indeterminacy that is the transformative element in human culture.

22. orman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The P ychoanalytic Meamng of History (Middletown Conn.: Wesleyan University Pres, 1959),38. 23. CG. Jung and Karl Kerenyi, Essay on a Science of Mythology: The Divine Child and the My teries of Eleusis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 79 Ef. 24. Gretchen Reynolds and Elizabeth JODes, Master Players: Learning from Children at Play ( ew York: Teacher College Pre ,1997). 25. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality ( ew York: Basic Books, 1971).

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These are only two form of the child's difference which follow from Freud's inquiry, characteristic of two moments in the rapid - compared to adults developmental passage of early childhood. Western psychologi ts aware of expanding cross-cultural anthropological data during the first half of the twentieth century (the most prominent among them Jean Piaget and Heinz Werner) explored the similarities between the young child's alternative ubject-world boundarie and the subjectivities of "aboriginals" and the mentally ill. 26 Ernst Cassirer investigated what he called "mythical thought," where as he described it, the rigid limit between "inside" and "outside," the "subjective" and the "objective" docs not subsist as such, but begins, as it were, to grow fluid. The inward and outward do not stand side by side, each as a separate province; each, rather, is reflected in tbe other, and only m {hi reciprocal relatiol! does each disclose its own meaningP

The early twentieth century i the first moment of the "return of the repres ed," when conquest and colonization underwent polar reversal. A Trojan Hor e entered the gates of We tern civilization, and the child, whom Jonathan Fineberg ha described as "a kind of dorn stic noble savage," wa in its belly.2s Psychology explored gestalt and field theory. Maurice Merleau-Ponty' formulation of the phenomenal or lived body, in chiasmic relation with a world that it both is and is not, acted further to deconstruct notion of discrete ubjectivity.29 Thi ontological groundwork in self-world tIUcture has been reinforced by an emerging list of alternative deep-epi temologies, a list which has grown to include, not ju t th original "savage" and "primitives" of the first half of th century, but omen, "people of color" in general, and, rna t recently in "queer theory," alternative sexualities. The emergence of pluralism in our interpr tation of the ubjectiv economy parallels the emergence of epistemological plurali m in general, and it xpres ion in the spheres of the humanities, the sciences, and the arts. It is in the latter that the child has had the most obvious and compelling influence. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in the 1940s, children' , e peciall young children's, characteristic ways of rendering the world in drawing and paint provided (along with alternative semiologies of "primitive" and Eastern art) a powerful deconstructive influence on tho e major European artists who were pre iding over the final dis olution of classical representationalism, and the emergence of the unconscious. 30 Surrealism and Dada were perhap the most culturally evocative 26. Jean Piaget, The Cbild's Conception of the World [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19291 and HeIDz Werner, Comparative P ycbology of Mental Development (New York: International Univer itie Pre , 1948). Both were heavily in1luenced by the work of anthropologi t Levy-Bruhl.

27. Ernst Cassirer, The Pbilosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought, tran . Ralph Mannheim (New York: Yale University Press, 19551, 99. 28. Jonathan Fineberg, The!nnocent Eye: Cbildren 's Art and the Mod em ArtiSt (Princeton Universl ty Pres , 1997), 1 J. 29. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin mitb (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, j 9621. 30. See Fineberg, Tbe Innocent Eye and David Kennedy, "Subver ive Innocence," Childhood 6, no. 3 (August 19991: 389-99.

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expressions of this phenomenon, crossing over as they did into literature and performance art. Surrealism sought to release the newly discovered language of the unconscious - a language inherently oneiric, polysemic and transgressive. For the rational and propositional self, which stakes its identity on clear formalized boundaries between subject and world, this language is subversive and incoherent. Its analogies to the language spoken by the young child through fantasy play - which, as Anna Freud pointed out, is equivalent to free association among adults in the psychoanalytic process31 - redirected attention to the child as alternative subjectivity, and therefore representative of a possible world to be encountered hermeneutically by adults. And in the realm of representation, painters such as Klee, Mira, Kandinsky, and Picasso took directly from the young child's characteristic expressive and representational style to break open a space for a language of symbol and emotion with a logic and syntax inaccessible to the classical representational tradition. Picasso said, "1 could draw like Raphael by the age of six. It ha taken me thirty years to learn to draw like a child. 1132 The larger cultural phenomenon to which all these example point i the child's contribution to what Merleau-Ponty called lithe attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason which remains the task of OUI century."33 As Western subjectivity is founded on a notion of reason and its dominant place in the subjective economy, so it will be our reinterpretation of reason - and coming to terms with its dark hadow - which will be the pivot point in a change in that economy. And it is the reason of those parts of Plato's soul considered to be without reason that is discovered in Freud's formulation. When the unconscious aspects of the psyche are allowed th ir reason, then classical reason is, not weakened, but reconstructed through expansion - this, anyway, is the contemporary Western gamble. Freud's discovery is the product, not just of science or philosophy, but of the clarification of the problem of evil which events of the twentieth century oblige us to seek. In that century the nation which had produced the most powerful philosophical tradition in European history, a tradition that dominated the Enlightenment project from Kant forward, perfected its rationalism with new techniques of systematic genocide. It was the century in which Communism's deeply reasoned ideal of social and economic justice ended in the Gulag; and in which Deism's Unseen Hand withered with the triumph of global corporate capitalism. It was the century, in other words, in which reason revealed its abysmal shadow - its Blakean Spectre. Dialectically, this was an affirmation of darkness, or of the necessity for its integration into the normative subjective structure.

31. Anna Freud, Tbe Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, trans. C. Baines (New York: International Univer ities Pre , 1946), 40. 32. See Kennedy, "SubverSive Innocence," 392. 33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Hegel/s Exi tentiaJi m,lt in Sense and Non-Sense, tran . H.L. and P.A. Dreyfus (Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 19641, 63.

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As I have aheady pointed out, Tung moved beyond Freud's economic and topographical formulations of subjectivity and offered a model of adult development that posited a shift somewhere in mid·life: a moment in which the Ego wa "detluoned" from its executive position, and a process of the integration of unconscious contents into the conscious self-structure began. The gate to this opening out of the Ego-definedstructur to the constellations ofthe unconscious is what he called the "shadow," by which he seems to have meant the shadow thrown by rea on' namely, the Ego iniormed by Superego - propositional constructs of what a "good," or an "honest," or a "reasonable" self should be. In order to move into the psychological space of the emergent integration of conscious and uncon ciou , we must confront the dragon-at-the-gate of our resentments, jealousies, petty vanity, and hidden pride, our capacity for hatred and envy, our cruelties, our perver e and wandering lusts, our miserable woundedness and fragmentation, our needine s. Thi is the shapeless and murky boundary-place where the sexual and aggressive instinctual energies live in uneasy symbiosis with Superego ideals. The material which the shadow covers is the boundary, not just between my Ego! Superego and the unconscious, hut between myself and the Other, for before r acknowledge the hadow material as my own, I project it onto other, and e them as the cause or embodiment of my envy, anger, perversity, cruelty, and so on. Once I own the material, I am in a position to recognize my projective relation with thc Other. This recognition is the precondition for recognizing, in tum, that J am a multiple self - that I live, not just within myself, but across the boundarie of the self and "within" the Other. In fact there is no clear "within," a it boundan hUt continually, and I am forced to see subjectivity and intersubjectivity a a field phenomenon. I recognize myself as more an "intersubject" than a subject, in that "I" am located both in myself and in the Other through projection and introjection. If the shadow is not what we mean by evil, it i at lea t what allow us to recognize our own capacity for evil. Once I recognize evil or the po sibility of evil within my elf, I stop projecting it onto the Other - or at lea t I can no longer ever be completely sure whether I am projecting or not. In integrating the hadow r accept my own abysmal incompletenes and finitude, and what Emmanuel L vina called the "rupture of th Egoist-L"34 r become a being whose own development depends on the development of others. lung's was perhaps not the first formulation of psychological development among adults, but what is distinctive about his account is that it assume, not just accretion, or gain, or loss, or even centering, but a process of continual reorganization. Unlike Freud's, which still assumed normative adulthood as a tatic condition, and any process it underwent as one of self-education or self-correction of an already complete structure, lung's was a dialectical model. Freud's notion of therapy could be characterized as one more example of the Stoic ideal of what Michel Foucault 34.EmmanuelLevina ,TimeandtheOther,tran .A.Lingi {Pitt burgh:Duqu neUniver ityPres ,19 17.

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called" technologies of the self" - a process by which reason turns and manipulates the other parts of the self in the interests of balance, harmony, and proper subordination of the lower parts to the higher. J5 On the other hand, Freud's descriptions of the interactions between Ego and the other elements of the self evoke a system of relation full of ambiguity, reversals, and risks of polarization or failure to connect. The Ego is still characterized as an embattled, even a tragic hero. In Jung, the hero abdicates the throne. It is the dawn of the democratic self. Henceforth, all balances - both within self and between self and Other - will be negotiated. The child starts a a negotiator, then is taught a culturally and historically mediated model of the internal and external relations of the self. This is accomplished by learning what thoughts and feeling are appropriate to express and what not, and when; by learning the limit and acceptable fonn of erotic and aggre ive feeling and behavior; by learning what telepathic knowledge of the Other or of ocial situations to pay attention to, to trust, ven to admit to - and what to ignore, d ny, suppress, or repress. All of these dispositions, learned through a thousand small or large interaction with significant others, make up a subjective repertoire held together in the armature of the self-concept, or image of the self as if seen by an Other. This self-concept/self-image is fitful, alternatively clear and obscure, distant or close, shot through with Superego ideals and prohibitions, and confirmed or disconfirmed in interactions with other. Its contents, and the manner in which it is held, are as much cultural as personal constructs. Childhood development is about constructing boundaries, both within the self and with the Other, and these boundaries are constructed in and a the body - they are the body and it lived en eofbeing. The adult who take upthetaskofcontinual reconstruction of these boundarie , based on ongoing experience and belief, puts herself again in the po ition of the child: of tarting again, of admitting to the position of the decentered Ego, of (like the child) not having all the information. Of encountering the world and the Other as not completely known, as unfinished. Of approaching the boundaries playfully. Of testing the boundaries. The implications of a form of adult subjectivity informed by child subjectivity apply, not just to Superego formation, or to personal and social relations, but to political relation and - more difficult till - to economic one. The plural, emergent self is a self of dialogical and therefore at least potentially democratic internal and external relations. Although the form the external relations take will be haped and limited by cultural and political traditions, it might also be argued that cultural, political, and economic traditions act to shape subjectivity and intersubjectivity. If we argue this way, then we could hypothesize that the plural self is an emergent outcome of at lea t everal hun.dred year of democra tic, socialist, and free enterprise aspiration ,experiments, and emergent insti tutions in the West. The reevaluation of childhood and its place in and significance for adult self-understanding, which has been underway in the We tat least since Rousseau's Emile, is a crucial

35. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self INew York: Random House, 19 6).

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dimension of these aspirations, experiments, and emergent institutions. The missing element is an educational tradition which reflects this reevaluation. The institution of schooling, in its obstinate, dreary conservatism, resists adult-child dialogue in both form and spirit - captured as it is by the binary opposition of adult and child and erving as it doe the reproduction of the classical adult subject. Perhap we will know we are approaching the next stage of the cultural emergence of the subject-in-process when schools start to understand themselves as studios and laboratories of transitional space - places where the play-impul e is understood as the fonn of activity that best expresses the human impulse for transformation. Play, said Friedrich Schiller, is everything that is neither subjectively nor objectively contingent, and yet impo es neither outward nor inward necessity... in a happy midway point between law and exigency... .!n proportion as it lessens the dynamic influence of the sensation and emotion, it will bring them into harmony with rational ideas; and in proportion as it deprive the law of reason oftheir moral compulsion, it will rec.oocile them with the interest of the en es.'·

It make ense - in fact it has made ense since Freud, at the dawn of what was heralded as the century of the child," put childhood and adulthood in dialogue that education would be the first of our in titutions to devote itself to the broad cultural emergence of the subject-in-process. This is not just because the experience of childhood is one of the paradigmatic model of the subject-in-proces , but becau e it is in childhood that aform of subjectivi ty is leamed in the body. The school devoted to the subject-in-process is as advanced as a cutting-edge scientificlaboratory, except in the realm of culture. There, a culture leams to seek the balance between play and work, autonomy and interdependence, the plea ur principle and the reality principle. There the product of culture are brought into the transitional play- pace and re-examined, reconstructed, re-imagined. /I

In order to fulfill this aspiration, school would have to be almo t completely reimagined. In order to re-imagine schools, childhood would have to be re-imagined. In fact this has been happening in the We t for the last two centurie - beginning with Rousseau, proliferating in Romanticism, self-articulating in Freud, and operationalizing in John Dewey and Paulo Freire. The tradition of early childhood curriculum and pedagogy which had its start with the Romantic Friedrich Froebel and whose mo t recent state of the art is found in the philo ophy and practice of the preschools of Reggio Emilia, is the only expression, apart from prophetic Summerhillian experiment , of adult-child dialogue and the construction of a transitional space. The inroads of this tradition into mainstream education are typically blunted, distorted, and co-opted by the self-blinding imperative of a system that simply cannot understand itself as other than a reproductive arm of the"state," understood in its broadest sense to include, not just legal, political, and economic form, but social, cultural, and relational ones - from the form of the community to the form

36. Friedrich chiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. R. Snell lNew York: Frederick Ungar, 1954), 78, 75.

Child and Postmodem Subjectivity

of the family to the form of individual sexual organization and of sexual "morality" - and the production of a subject to maintain these forms. Freud's contribution to education was given on the deepestlevel, and was primarily a deconstructive one: he found the fault line in the Platonic subject (the ubject of the tate pm excellence). Jung boldly broke with the impasse created by Freud's conflicted, late-Victorian formulation, and opened the internal dialogue that leads to an understanding of subjectivity as a continuous reconstructive process. This new model of subjectivity confronts the "dark Satanic mills" of reproductive education and demands a new form - a form that recognizes the subject-inproce s and thereby reinscribes itself in culture andsoci ty a an insti tution devoted, not to reproduction, but to transformation. It is, after all, in the adult's discovery of the child - to the extent that "child" represents play, transitionality, self reinvention, boundary work, growth, spontaneity, plasticity, vulnerability, enthusiasm, and deep inquiry - in short, the Romantic notion of generic "genius" - that the po tmodem subject had its earliest formulation. This being the case, that adultchild intentional community called" chool" i potentially a space where adult-child dialogue results a much in the Ie-imagining of adulthood as of childhood. Lacking this transformation of the institution of school, it is likely that its drift toward cultural irrelevance, and its gradual replacement by agencies like corporate training centers which do its reproductive job more efficiently will continue. On the other hand, re-imagining childhood eems inevitable, for it is inextricably linked with reimagining adulthood, which is a process we do not choo e. The age demand it.

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